* * * * *

‘WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH US?’

  What will we do with you, if God
    Should give you over to our hands,
  To pass in turn beneath the rod,
    And wear at last the captive’s bands?’
  ‘What will we do?’ Our very best
    To make of each a glorious State,
  Worthy to match with North and West,—­
    Free, vigorous, beautiful and great! 
  As God doth live, as Truth is true,
    We swear we’ll do all this to you.

* * * * *

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

A late National Review asserts with true English shrewdness that American literature is yet to be born,—­that it has scarcely a substantive existence.  ‘Its best works,’ says this modern Scaliger, ’are scarcely more than a promise of excellence; the precursors of an advent; shadows cast before, and, like most shadows, they are too vague and ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms, to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are flung....  The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of England, has no separate existence....  The United States have yet to sign their intellectual Declaration of Independence:  they are mentally still only a province of this country.’  With a gallantry too characteristic to be startling, a discernment that does all honor to his taste, and a coolness highly creditable to his equatorial regions of discussion, the critic continues by assuring his readers that Washington Irving was not an American.  He admits that by an accident, for which he is not responsible, this beloved scholar, writer and gentleman claimed our country as his birthplace, and even, perhaps, had a ’full appetite to this place of his kindly ingendure,’ but informs us he was an undeniable contemporary of Addison and Steele, a veritable member of the Kit-Cat Club.  We may reasonably anticipate that the next investigation of this penetrative ethnologist may result in the appropriation to us of that fossil of nineteenth-century literature, Martin Farquhar Tupper, an intellectual quid pro quo, which will doubtless be received gratefully by a public already supposed to be lamenting the unexpected loss of its co-nationality with Irving.

What species of giant the watchful affection of Motherland awaits in a literature whose unfledged bantlings are Cooper, Emerson, Holmes, Motley and Lowell, our imagination does not attempt to depict.  We venture, however, to predict that the National Review will not be called upon to stand sponsor for the bairn, whose advent it so pleasantly announces, and for whose christening should be erected a cathedral more vast than St. Peter’s, a temple rarer than that of Baalbec.  But while our sensitive cousin across the water would pin us down to a credo as absurd as that of Tertullian, and hedge us in with the adamantine wall of his own lordly fiat, let us, who fondly hope we have a literature, whose principal defect—­a defect to which the one infallible remedy is daily applied by the winged mower—­is youth, inquire into its leading characteristics, seeing if haply we may descry the elements of a golden maturity.