aster the past if you will, but only that you may the more
completely forget it in the present. He or she is best and bravest
among you who gives us the freshest draughts of reality and of
Nature. It lies all around you--in the foul smoke and smell of the
factory, amid the crash and slip of heavy wheels on muddy stones,
in the blank-gilt glare of the steamboat saloon, by the rattling
chips of the faro table, in the quiet, gentle family circle, in the
opera, in the six-penny concert, the hotel, the watering-place, on
the prairie, in the prison. Not as the poor playwright and little
sensation-story grinder see them, not as the manufacturers of
Magdalen elegies and mock-moral and mock-philanthropical tales skim
them, but in their truth and freshness as facts, around and through
which sweep incessantly the infinite joys and agonies, the dreams
and loves and despair of _humanity_. Heavens! is not LIFE as
earnest and as mysterious and as well worth the fierce grapple of
GENIUS, here and _now_, in this American nineteenth century, as it
ever was under the cedars of Italy, the olives of Greece, or the
palms of Morning Land? Are there not as much, or more vigor and
raciness in the practical souls of the multitude and in their
never-ending strife with Nature, as among the spoiled and dainty
darlings of fortune and among the nerveless, mind-emasculated
Victims of Society who sing us their endless Miserere from the
Sistine chapels of fashionable novels? You know there is, and if
you watch the time, you may see that it is the warm truth from real
life, which is most eagerly read and which goes most directly to
the hearts of all. Never yet in history was there an age or a
country so rich in great ideas, in great developments, or which
offered such copious material to the writer as these of ours. Be
bold and seize it with a strong hand. Those who are to live after
us will wonder as we now do of the great eras of the past, that
there were so few on the spot to picture them. Yet, why speak of
_great_ scenes, when humanity and Nature are always great--great in
small things even, far beyond our utmost power of apprehension?
Forget the spirit of the past, live in the present, and thus--and
thus only--you will secure a glorious and undying reward in the
future.

The fa