6 REV. JONES VERY, IN MEMORIAM J 



I intend to speak only as to Mr. Very's literary ex- 

 cellence and place. Single as he was in his own literature, 

 I would be as single in the purpose and end of these 

 remarks, and with some variety of illustration, to talk 

 about poetry with Mr. Very as text. 



The American loves the superlative. Amid endless 

 surroundings, it is easy to see why. His language 

 stretches after a reality which is ever fleeing before him. 

 He lives in the midst of boundlessness and his words 

 labor after its conceptions. By a natural sympathy, lim- 

 itless vistas, physical and intellectual, slip into the at- 

 mosphere of his mind. Words of unbounded meaning 

 alone fit his emotions. The continent swells in his 

 speech. He is the most unfettered creature ever put 

 upon the earth, the last heir of time, he believes the final. 

 If I follow the national bent of sweeping assertion and 

 emphatic statement, I shall only be patriotic and very 

 natural. 



Cut off from the past which is poetry, we become imi- 

 tative. Our intellectual home is England or the old 

 world, stretching back through literature and life to an- 

 tiquity and the bible. We have none of it. We are raw, 

 we are digging the foundation of a new civilization to 

 correct and abolish the errors of the old. There is no 

 superstructure yet. We have just begun. We are imper- 

 fect germs sloughed off to manure the future. Every- 

 thing is tentative here, inchoate. 



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Our people are impressible, have an artistic tempera- 

 ment more than the English. They are poetic, romantic, 

 we are not. Nothing in our bare, mercantile life, just 

 scratching the continent, yet makes us so. No associa- 

 tions disturb the dream of the merchant's life. The 

 mind of America is mercantile perforce ; how can it be 

 otherwise? There is no variety in class, history or 



