E. A. SILSBEE'S REMARKS. 9 



state we form. We are incessantly thinned out to fill 

 up the West. The seaboard is a sieve. 



The Ohio New Englander is greater than his ancestor, 

 the best type of American, midway east and west. He 

 is more in the mould of Washington. The centre has 

 shifted westward. The only great man New England 

 produced, world-wide man, was Franklin. He had to be 

 hurried out of New England before he was of age. It 

 is impossible to conceive of Franklin having grown up, 

 been bred, and filling out his career in Boston the most 

 antique man we have had, a pagan as big as Goethe. 

 New England is the indispensable influence, not the basis. 



With all our vastness, we are colonial, provincial ; crude 

 for that very reason ; too widespread to ripen and grow 

 mature on our own ground and by our own figtree. We 

 cannot be at home in three thousand miles of continent 

 and in forty states, each sovereign. It is like loving a 

 parish. There cannot be more than a certain number of 

 brothers and sisters. You cannot fold the human race to 

 your bosom, though the Mormons stretch things in this 

 way I suppose. 



The whole American poetry is not equal to one great 

 English poet, and would not be missed if lost to-morrow. 

 Not to speak of Chaucer, Spenser and the whole great 

 roll, we- have no Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, 

 Scott, Coleridge, Dryden, Gray, Pope, Thompson nor 

 Moore, not a man to set beside them. Our poetry is ill 

 a hopeless minor key, has pleasing notes, no new har- 

 mony ; has never displayed a new phase of imaginative 

 feeling and an accompanying freshness of form, the poet's 

 own. It is not a great part of literature, hardly a brick 

 to put into the edifice of English poetic literature, we 

 think not one. He is a poet who stands for something 

 distinctively his own and cannot be missed in English lit- 



