Take Tennyson's "Idyls
of the King," and see what beautiful beadrolls of names he can string
together from the rough Cornish and Devon coasts. Only out of a
poetic-hearted people are poets born. The peasant writes ballads,
though scholars and antiquaries collect them. The Hebrew lyric fire
blazed in myriad beacons from every landmark. The soil of Palestine is
trodden, as it were, with the footsteps of God, so eloquent are its
mountains and hamlets with these records of a nation's faith.
But into how much of the love of home do its familiar names enter! And
we appeal to the common sense of everybody, whether those we have
quoted above are not enough to make a man ashamed of his birthplace.
They are the ear-mark of a roving, careless, selfish population, which
thinks only of mill-privileges, and never of pleasant meadows,--which
has built the ugliest dwellings and the biggest hotels of any nation,
save the Calmucks, over whom reigns the Czar. Upon the American soil
seem destined to meet and fuse the two great elements of European
civilization,--the Latin and the Saxon,--and of these two is our nation
blent. But just at present it exhibits the love of glare and finery of
the one, without its true and tender taste,--and the sturdy, practical
utilitarianism of the other, without its simple-hearted, home-loving
poetry.
Pages:
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184