E. A. SILSBEE'S REMARKS. 11 



selfish, the German stolid and coarse. We are gentle and 

 refined beyond any European precedent and owe it to 

 republicanism and the sex. This alone makes up for 

 heaps of poetry and art, and what a basis of civilization ! 



They are never lifted and lost, our poets, never moved 

 to the centre, the passion is never torn out of them 

 as it is in Wordsworth, Cowper, men of calm tempera- 

 ment. They are never wrought upon till the fire flies as 

 sparks from living coal. We have no ode nor elegy, ex- 

 cept Emerson's "Threnody" be one, yet if I am right it 

 has not the passion of sentiment. From Chaucer down, 

 the English have been susceptible of exclamations. We 

 have not one, only rhetorical such as I have quoted. This 

 rhetorical stage is natural to a young people with nature 

 at hand to inflate them and stretch their note to bursting. 



Our poets survey nature without ecstasy. They have 

 never had the fine frenzy. When one will write a soul- 

 stirring lyric to the bobolink, such as the English poets 

 have written to the skylark, or be touched by one great 

 feature of nature and celebrate it in immortal verse, I will 

 believe in American poetry. The piece coming nearest 

 to English writing in this kind seems to me Bryant's 

 " Water Fowl," which has grace and distinction if not 

 passion. " Wilt thou not visit me" of our own poet has 

 something of the same note. 



Our poets make literary capital out of nature, catalogue 

 her. Why they are so barren in emotion, according to 

 Taine's manner of accounting for such phenomena and 

 characteristics, is not far to seek perhaps, — Puritanism 

 and a new land. Civilization is a very complex affair and 

 depends on the past as on the future. Our past is in 

 Europe. We are violently cut off from it. It is our in- 

 tellectual birthright. Our intellectual home is there. 

 Hence crudity, commonplace here, which is colonial and 



