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THE NATIONAL INHERITANCE.

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Secondly, Our

tongue.

transatlantic Saxon races. Our people have blun-
dered from isolation; confront them with the models
of older lands, and they quickly learn to choose the
fit and beautiful, and the time is now reached when
the finest models are widely attainable.
our inheritance is a language that is relatively the English
greatest treasure-house of the world's literature: at
once the most laconic and the most copious of
tongues,
the sturdiest in its foundations of emo-
tion and utility, the most varied by appropriation of
synonyms from all languages, new and old; the
youngest and most occidental of the great modes of
speech, steadily diffusing itself about the globe, with
no possible supplanter or successor except itself at
further stages of maturity; finally, elastic and copi-
ous most of all in the land which adds to it new
idioms, of cisatlantic growth, or assimilated from the
dialects of many races that here contribute their dic-
tion to its own. A language whose glory is that
even corruptions serve to speed its growth, and whose
fine achievement long has been to make the neolo-
gism, even the solecism, of one generation the clas-
sicism of the next. This is the potent and sono-
rous instrument which our poet has at his command,
and the genius of his country, like Ariel, bids him

66 - take

This slave of music, for my sake."

THE twilight of the poets, succeeding to the Past, brightness of their first diurnal course, is a favora- Present, and ble interval at which to review the careers of those Future. whose work therewith is ended. Although at such a time public interest may set in other directions, I

Art's

kw.

have adhered to a task so arduous, yet so fascinating to the critical and poetic student. When the lustre of a still more auspicious day shall yield in its turn to the recurring dusk, a new chronicler will have the range of noble imaginations to consider, heightened in significance by comparison with the field of these prior excursions. But, if I have not wholly erred in respect to the lessons derivable from the past, he will not go far beyond them. The canons are not subject to change; he, in turn, will dechangeless duce the same elements appertaining to the chief of arts, and test his poets and their bequests by the same unswerving laws. And concerning the dawn which may soon break upon us unawares, as we make conjecture of the future of American song, it is difficult to keep the level of restraint - to avoid "rising on the wings of prophecy." Who can doubt. that it will correspond to the future of the land itself, of America now wholly free and interblending, with not one but a score of civic capitals, each an emulative centre of taste and invention, a focus of energetic life, ceaseless in action, radiant with the glow of beauty and creative power.

INDEX.

INDEX.

ABBEY, HENRY (1842- ), 443.
Accent, 373; and quantity, 198.
"Ad Vatem," 131.

Addison, 286.

Affaire Clémenceau, by Dumas, fils,
368.

Affectation, Poe's, 260; the bane of

poetry, 312; Byron's, 312; types of,
313; and see 388.
Affluence, Lowell's, 337.
Agamemnon's Daughter, Snider's, 454.
Ages, The, Bryant's, 73.

Airs from Arcady, Bunner's, 448.
Akenside, 67.

Albee, John, 443.

Alcott, Amos Bronson, 52, 355.
Alden, Henry Mills, on Whitman,
381.

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 440; beauty
of his verse and prose, ib.; artistic
restraint, 441; as a novelist, 462;
and see 54, 404, 420, 442, 463.
Alger, William Rounseville (1823- ),
55.

Allan, John, foster-father of Poe,
230-232.

Allen, Elizabeth Ann Akers (1832- ),
50, 446.

Allston, Washington, 37, 39, 46.
America, how far homogeneous, 8;

course of its intellect and action,
31; poetry, 45; milieu, 48.
America, Poetry of, its rise the sub-
ject of this work, 1, 4; historic sig-

nificance, 2; conditions affecting it,
II-25; its barren colonial period,
12-16; Revolutionary period, 16;
early Republican period, 16-25;
first real school, 28-30; effect of
Civil War, 29; review of its evo-
lution from early times to the vigor
of the recent school, 31-61; long
subsidiary to other literature, 31;
sectional differentiation, 37; pseu-
do-American, 42, 43; School of Na-
ture, 45-47; national and domestic,
48, 49; religious, 50; culture, phil-
osophic, artistic, etc., 51-59, —
Whitman decries same, 60; review
of existing conditions and specu-
lation as to future, 435-476; early
and later characteristics distin-
guished, 459; promise of the future,
476; and see INTRODUCTION.
Americanism, in what consisting, 5-
10; Grant White's statement, 5;
readily distinguished, 5-10; phys-
ical, 5; mental, etc., 6-8; incom-
pleteness, 7; composite, 7, 8; its
value, 8; foreign recognition, 8, 9;
sectional and local types, 9, 10;
the new Americanism, 10; emo-
tional traits, 29; pseudo-literary,
42, 43; Saxon quality of, 48; Bry-
ant's, 66; types of, 95, 99, 100; rec-
ognized traits, 96; question of a
"national" and " thoroughly Amer-
ican "
poet, 96, 97; Whittier's, III;

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