long since passed away. Had Dante's scope been narrowed
to contemporary Italy, the "Divina Commedia" would have been a
picture-book merely. But his theme was Man, and the vision that inspired
him was of an Italy that never was nor could be, his political theories
as abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza. Shakespeare shows us less of
the England that then was than any other considerable poet of his time.
The struggle of Goethe's whole life was to emancipate himself from
Germany, and fill his lungs for once with a more universal air.

Yet there is always a flavor of the climate in these rare fruits, some
gift of the sun peculiar to the region that ripened them. If we are ever
to have a national poet, let us hope that his nationality will be of
this subtile essence, something that shall make him unspeakably nearer
to us, while it does not provincialize him for the rest of mankind. The
popular recipe for compounding him would give us, perhaps, the most
sublimely furnished bore in human annals. The novel aspects of life
under our novel conditions may give some freshness of color to our
literature; but democracy itself, which many seem to regard as the
necessary Lucina of some new poetic birth, is altogether too abstract an
influence to serve for any such purpose. If any American author may be
looked on as in some sort the result of our social and political ideal,
it is Emerson, who, in his emancipation from the traditional, in the
irresponsible freedom of his speculation, and his faith in the absolute
value of his own individuality, is certainly, to some extent, typical;
but if ever author was inspired by the past, it is he, and he is as far
as possible from the shaggy hero of prophecy. Of the sham-shaggy, who
have tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and may
safely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be our
representative singer.[1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to the
credit of democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we may safely hope
for better things.

[Footnote 1: This is undoubtedly an allusion to Walt Whitman, who is
mentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells. The
Howells essay appeared two years before the above. A.M.]

The themes of poetry have been pretty much the same from the first; and
if a man should ever be born among us with a great imagination, and the
gift of the right word,--for it is these, and not sublime spaces, that
make a poet,--he w