Of most foreign countries, small or large, from the remotest times
known, down to our own, each has contributed after its kind, directly
or indirectly, at least one great undying song, to help vitalize and
increase the valor, wisdom, and elegance of humanity, from the points of
view attain'd by it up to date. The stupendous epics of India, the holy
Bible itself, the Homeric canticles, the Nibelungen, the Cid Campeador,
the Inferno, Shakspere's dramas of the passions and of the feudal lords,
Burns's songs, Goethe's in Germany, Tennyson's poems in England, Victor
Hugo's in France, and many more, are the widely various yet integral
signs or land-marks, (in certain respects the highest set up by the
human mind and soul, beyond science, invention, political amelioration,
&c.,) narrating in subtlest, best ways, the long, long routes of
history, and giving identity to the stages arrived at by aggregate
humanity, and the conclusions assumed in its progressive and varied
civilizations.... Where is America's art-rendering, in any thing like
the spirit worthy of herself and the modern, to these characteristic
immortal monuments? So far, our Democratic society, (estimating its
various strata, in the mass, as one,) possesses nothing--nor have we
contributed any characteristic music, the finest tie of nationality--to
make up for that glowing, blood-throbbing, religious, social, emotional,
artistic, indefinable, indescribably beautiful charm and hold which
fused the separate parts of the old feudal societies together, in their
wonderful interpenetration, in Europe and Asia, of love, belief,
and loyalty, running one way like a living weft--and picturesque
responsibility, duty, and blessedness, running like a warp the other
way. (In the Southern States, under slavery, much of the same.)...
In coincidence, and as things now exist in the States, what is more
terrible, more alarming, than the total want of any such fusion
and mutuality of love, belief, and rapport of interest, between
the comparatively few successful rich, and the great masses of the
unsuccessful, the poor? As a mixed political and social question, is not
this full of dark significance? Is it not worth considering as a problem
and puzzle in our democracy--an indispensable want to be supplied?