The outbreak of the Revolution arrested what little growth there was in letters and science.  Franklin carried his reputation, the first one born of science in the country, to the French court, and West and Copley sought fame and success, and found them, in England.  All the talent we had was absorbed in the production of political essays and state-papers.  Patriotic poems, satires, jeux d’esprit, with more or less of the esprit implied in their name, were produced, not sparingly; but they find it hard work to live, except in the memory of antiquaries.  Philip Freneau is known to more readers from the fact that Campbell did him the honor to copy a line from him without acknowledgment than by all his rhymes.  It is not gratifying to observe the want, so noticeable in our Revolutionary period, of that inspiration which the passions of such a struggle might have been expected to bring with them.

If we are forced to put this estimate upon our earlier achievements in the domain of letters, it is not surprising that they were held of small account in the mother-country.  It is not fair to expect the British critics to understand our political literature, which was until these later years all we had to show.  They had to wait until De Lolme, a Swiss exile, explained their own Constitution to them, before they had a very clear idea of it.  One British tourist after another visited this country, with his glass at his eye, and his small vocabulary of “Very odd!” for all that was new to him; his “Quite so!” for whatever was noblest in thought or deed; his “Very clever!” for the encouragement of genius; and his “All that sort of thing, you know!” for the less marketable virtues and heroisms not to be found in the Cockney price-current.  They came, they saw, they made their books, but no man got from them any correct idea of what the Great Republic meant in the history of civilization.  For this the British people had to wait until De Tocqueville, a Frenchman, made it in some degree palpable to insular comprehension.

The true-born Briton read as far as the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.  There he stopped, and there he has stuck ever since.  That sentence has been called a “glittering generality,”—­as if there were some shallow insincerity about it.  But because “all that glitters is not gold,” it does not follow that nothing which glitters is gold.  Because a statement is general, it does not follow that it is either untrue or unpractical.  “Glittering generality” or not, the voice which proclaimed that the birthright of equality belonged to all mankind was the fiat lux of the new-born political universe.  This, and the terrible series of logical consequences that flowed from it, threatening all the dynasties, menacing all the hierarchies, undermining the seemingly solid foundations of all Old-World abuses,—­this parent truth, and all to which it gave birth, made up the literature of Revolutionary America, and dwarfed all the lesser growths of culture for the time, as the pine-tree dwarfs the herbage beneath the circle of its spreading branches.