(5) THE views thus far advanced suggest a principle in the selection of authors, by which the principles already named should be modified. It is, that, in our estimate of authors, the just claims of American literature should be recognized. The chief value of this suggestion is felt not so much in the practical selection of books as in the spirit in which a pastor's studies are conducted. Respect for the national mind of one's own country and for contemporaneous authorship is a prime factor in the preparation of a man to minister to his own countrymen. The same law by which a preacher's culture is impaired for professional service by an excessive fondness for the ancient rather than the modern, or the distant above the near, in literary development, holds good respecting a similar preference of the foreign to the national literature.

It must be conceded that one of the dangers to the reading of an American pastor is that he will read disproportionately American books. Our proximity to them, the ease with which they can be obtained, and the fulsome style of criticism in which American periodicals indulge, expose us to the peril of wasting our

mental force on works of ephemeral authority. An American library needs frequent weeding to rid it of books which do not wear well in the judgment of mature scholarship. One of the most eminent of our American scholars, at the time of his decease, had hundreds of such discarded volumes in his attic-chambers, where he had hidden them for years, that his eye might not be wearied by the sight of them, and, perhaps, that his vanity might not be wounded by the remembrance of his folly in purchasing them. During the civil war, when manufacturers gave large prices for waste paper, many libraries were reduced in bulk, but improved in quality, by the sale of American books to peddlers.

Still, in this as in more important things, it is a protection against the extreme to see and to trust the mean. The principle is a sound one, that an American scholar should recognize the growth of American mind. In books, as in affairs, that growth demands a scholarly respect. The literature of one's country does not deserve the pre-eminence which belongs to that of one's vernacular. The growth of a language is a more profound development of mind than the peopling of a continent, or the organization of a republic. But there is a literary justice which a preacher should not withhold from the literature of his country in his adjustment of proportions in his own reading. He can not do it without peril to the adaptations of his own culture to professional service.

Our American literature, be it observed, then, claims our recognition on three grounds. One is that of its intrinsie merits in some departments. In poetry it must in candor be admitted that we have nothing yet

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POEMS IN ACTION.

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to show which criticism places by the side of the great poets of England. The American is not yet a poetic temperament. Our civilization has not yet reached the poetic stage of its development. Our national history is not old enough to create for itself the poetic enthusiasm. We have, also, in the past of the English mind, so radiant a constellation of poets, that the taste of our own scholars delights in them without attempting to emulate their luster. "Like thee I will not build; better I can not," said Michael Angelo of the dome of Santa Maria in Florence. Such may be the instinct of the American imagination in visiting the "Poets' Corner" of Westminster Abbey.

Whatever be the cause of the phenomenon, we owe it to the integrity of our critical judgment to acknowledge the fact that our literature is not eminent in this department of production. We are a young nation. We have been living poems. Many events in our history are grand themes for poetic story. Says a writer in "The Edinburgh Review," "There is a poetry of the past, of the mountains, the seas, the stars; but a great city seen aright is tenfold more poetical than them all." A Pacific railroad is a poem in act. The State of Massachusetts is a poem. Old Governor Winthrop is a hero beyond Greek or Roman fame. The colonization of Kansas is splendid material for a great epic: so is the war of the rebellion. Magnificent materials have we in our history for poetry which shall by and by rival Wordsworth's sonnets, and Shakspeare's historical dramas. They will give birth to great poems when age has gathered around them the imaginative reverence of scholars. As Carlyle says of "The Mayflower," "Were we of open sense, as the Greeks were,

we had found a poem here, one of Nature's own, such as she writes in broad facts over great continents."

In several other departments, however, we have a literature already of which we need not be ashamed. In the department of history America is represented by authors whom European criticism does not hesitate to rank by the side of the great historians of England. Baron Alexander Humboldt thought that there was not in existence a finer specimen of historic writing than Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella." In the department of the essay we have writers representing in monographs nearly all the varieties of English style as perfectly as writers of the same class in Great Britain.

In prose-fiction Walter Scott and Charles Dickens are the only names which deserve to precede that of Cooper. Mrs. Stowe must be credited with having produced a romance which has had a larger circulation, in more numerous languages, than any other book ever published, except the Bible. In forensic and parliamentary eloquence the names of Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Sumner, do not suffer by the side of Burke, Pitt, Fox, Brougham. In the department of demonstrative eloquence I do not know the name in the annals of any living nation which should stand before that of Edward Everett. For that style of eloquence, Everett's orations are well-nigh perfect.

In the literature of the pulpit there certainly are names, of the living and the dead, which must be ranked as equals, at least, of the most powerful preachers of England. In no country in the world has the pulpit proved its power by its effects more conspicuously than in ours. The fear sometimes expressed of the decline of the American pulpit is not entirely un

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OUR LITERATURE ENGLISH.

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warranted; yet, all things considered, the evidences of decline are offset by evidences of improvement. Our pulpit has a fluctuating history; but on the whole it has never had a more docile, and at the same time intelligent, hearing than it has to-day. The decline of the pulpit in the sense so much boasted of by skeptical critics is disproved by the very impunity with which those critics proclaim their sentiments. They would be at the whipping-post, and their books burnt by the hangman, if the American pulpit had not assisted by its reasoning habits to enlighten and liberalize the popular faith. On the ground, therefore, of its intrinsic merits, American literature deserves to be recognized in our estimate of the resources of our professional discipline.

It deserves recognition, also, as an offshoot of the literature of England. This is at present its relative position. As we have no American language, neither have we an American literature, which is not a graft upon the English stock. Their literature is ours, and ours is theirs. In this respect our literature partakes of the same character with that of nearly all the institutions which lie deepest in our civilization. Those institutions are essentially English. Our religion, our jurisprudence, our educational policy, our periodical press, our tendencies in philosophy, in a word the make of American mind in all its great expressions of itself, are English at bottom. They are not German; they are not French; they are not derivatives from the ancient republics: they are English. No man understands the American mind who fails to appreciate this, or who does not act upon it in his public life.

Public speakers among us fail to reach the popular