By him at last the epos of the New World was to be fitly sung,
the great tragi-comedy of democracy put upon the stage for all time. It
was a cheap vision, for it cost no thought; and, like all judicious
prophecy, it muffled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of its
terms. Till the advent of this splendid apparition, who should dare
affirm positively that he would never come? that, indeed, he was
impossible? And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, nevertheless.
Supposing a great poet to be born in the West, though he would naturally
levy upon what had always been familiar to his eyes for his images and
illustrations, he would almost as certainly look for his ideal somewhere
outside of the life that lay immediately about him. Life in its large
sense, and not as it is temporarily modified by manners or politics, is
the only subject of the poet; and though its elements lie always close
at hand, yet in its unity it seems always infinitely distant, and the
difference of angle at which it is seen in India and in Minnesota is
almost inappreciable. Moreover, a rooted discontent seems always to
underlie all great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it. The Iliad
and the Odyssey paint manners that are only here and there incidentally
true to the actual, but which in their larger truth had either never
existed or had long since passed away.
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