30 HEREDITY. 



Undoubtedly the American literature of the 

 future will be largely influenced by our past ; and so 

 we ought to thank Providence that in the first two 

 hundred years of our development we have not had 

 a Byron, great or small, and that no Sardanapalus 

 rules our cities of the .soul as yet. Now that woman 

 has come into literature, it may be hoped that Eng- 

 lish poetry, in spite of a Swinburne now and then, 

 is permanently purified ; and we are English. " The 

 American," Lowell says, "is the Englishman re- 

 enforced." All English literature up to Milton is 

 the hereditary personal property of Americans as 

 much as of Britons. Our poetry has native roots 

 not only in Shakspeare and Chaucer, but also in 

 Virgil and Homer. On the spiritual map Boston 

 is nearer Athens than is any capital of Europe. 

 When a Schliemann uncovers at Mycenae one of 

 the heroes of the Iliad, American Hellenism stands 

 at the tomb with bated breath. A shiver of glad- 

 ness runs through all articulate speaking men, when 

 Homer is found to be not a myth, but a person in 

 whom even a Gladstone can believe as a reality. 



The roots of the literature of America, however, 

 are watered from a very peculiar atmosphere ; and it 

 may well be that the coloring of our poetry in the 

 future will take something of breadth from our dem- 

 ocratic development. It is a strange thing, that one 

 of the English schools of criticism finds the best 

 American poetry in the savage prose halloo of a 

 Whitman. His barbaric, literary war-whoop, a few 

 think distinctively American. If the breath of it 



