above him. This is not truth.
The higher you lift the mass, the more will they acknowledge and
appreciate worth, the clearer will they see that what makes man human,
beautiful, and beneficent is conduct and intelligence; and so increasing
enlightenment will turn thought and admiration from position and wealth,
from the pomp and show of life to what makes a man's self, his
character, his mind, his manners even,--for the source of manners lies
within us. In a society like ours, the chosen ones, the best, the models
of life, and the leaders of thought will be distinguished from the crowd
not by accident or circumstance, but by inner strength and beauty, by
finer knowledge, by purer love, by a deeper faith in God, by a more
steadfast trust that it must, and shall be, well with a world which God
makes and rules, and which to the fairest mind is fairest, and to the
holiest soul most sacred.

Here and now, if ever anywhere at any time, there is need of men, there
is appeal to what is godlike in man, calling upon us to rise above our
prosperities, our politics, our mechanical aims and implements, and to
turn the courage, energy, and practical sense which have wrought with
miraculous power in developing the material resources of America, to the
cultivation of our spiritual faculties. We alone of the great modern
nations are without classical writers of our own, without a national
literature. The thought and love of this people, its philosophy, poetry,
and art lies yet in the bud; and our tens of thousands of books, even
the better sort, must perish to enrich the soil that nourishes a life of
heavenly promise. Hitherto we have been sad imitators of the English,
but not the best the English have done will satisfy America. Their
language indeed will remain ours, and their men of genius, above all
their poets, will enrich our minds with great thoughts nobly expressed.
But a literature is a national growth; it is the expression of a
people's life and character, the more or less perfect utterance of what
it loves, aims at, believes in, hopes for; it has the qualities and the
defects of the national spirit; it bears the marks of the thousand
influences that help to make that spirit what it is,--and English
literature cannot be American literature, for the simple reason that
Americans are not Englishmen, any more than they are Germans or
Frenchmen. We must be ourselves in our thinking and writing, as in our
living, or be insignificant,