It is the new consciousness of the one mind, which predominates in criticism. We can easily concede that a steadfast tendency of this sort appears in modern literature. The poet is not content to see how "Fair hangs the apple from the rock," "What music a sunbeam awoke in the groves," nor of Hardiknute, howīut he now revolves, What is the apple to me? and what the birds to me? and what is Hardiknute to me? and what am I? And this is called subjectiveness, as the eye is withdrawnįrom the object and fixed on the subject or mind. The poetry and speculation of the age are marked by a certain philosophic turn, which discriminates them from the works of earlier times. And thus, and not by mechanical diffusion, does an original genius work and spread himself. It almost alone has called out the genius of the German nation into an activity which, spreading from the poetic into the scientific, religious and philosophical domains, has made theirs now at last the paramount intellectual influence of the world, reacting with great energy on England and America. First the prodigious growth and influence of the genius of Shakspeare, in the last one hundred and fifty years, is itself a fact of the first importance. Great mass of the permanent literature of the human race, one or two instances would be conspicuous. If we should designate favorite studies in which the age delights more than in the rest of this How can the age be a bad one which gives me Plato and Paul and Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Spinoza, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, beside its own riches? Our presses groan every year with new editions of all the select pieces of the first of mankind,-meditations, history, classifications, opinions, epics, lyrics, which the age adopts by quoting them. In our present attempt to enumerate some traits of the recent literature, we shall have somewhat to offer on each of these topics, but we cannot promise to set in very exact order what we have to say. In order to any complete view of the literature of the present age, an inquiry should include what it quotes, what it writes and what it wishes to write. The rose out of the cheek of him that wrote them, and give him to the midnight a sad, solitary, diseased man which leave no man where they found him, but make him better or worse and which work dubiously on society and seem to inoculate it with a venom before any healthy result appears. Along with these it vents books that breathe of new morning, that seem to heave with the life of millions, books for which men and women peak and pine books which take It exhibits a vast carcass of tradition every year with as much solemnity as a new revelation. It can hardly be characterized by any species of book, for every opinion, old and new, every hope and fear, every whim and folly, has an organ. In looking at the library of the Present Age, we are first struck with the fact of the immense miscellany. This beautiful result must be credited to literature also in casting its account. Over every true poem lingers a certain wild beauty, immeasurable a happiness lightsome and delicious fills the heart and brain, as they say every man walks environed by his proper atmosphere, extending to some distance around him. If I analyze the sentences, it eludes me, but is the genius and suggestion of the whole. That is not in their grammatical construction which they give me. I have just been reading poems which now in memory shine with a certain steady, warm, autumnal light. Observe moreover that we ought to credit literature with much more than the bare word it gives us. Invite us on every hand, life is made up of them. We return to the house and take up Plutarch or Augustine, and read a few sentences or pages, and lo! the air swims with life, secrets of magnanimity and grandeur We go musing into the vault of day and night no constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points, the roses, brick-colored leaves, and frogs pipe, mice cheep, and wagons creak along the road. Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book. Our souls are not self-fed, but do eat and drink of chemical water and wheat. When we flout all particular books as initial merely, we truly express the privilege of spiritual nature, but alas, not the fact and fortune of this low Massachusetts and Boston, of these humble Junes and Decembers of mortal life. They keep alive the memory and the hope of a better day. IN our fidelity to the higher truth we need not disown our debt, in our actual state of culture, in the twilights of experience, to these rude helpers.
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