If you go to Europe, (to say nothing of Asia, more ancient and massive
still,) you cannot stir without meeting venerable mementos--cathedrals,
ruins of temples, castles, monuments of the great, statues and
paintings, (far, far beyond anything America can ever expect to
produce,) haunts of heroes long dead, saints, poets, divinities, with
deepest associations of ages. But here in the New World, while _those_
we can never emulate, we have _more_ than those to build, and far more
greatly to build. (I am not sure but the day for conventional monuments,
statues, memorials, &c., has pass'd away--and that they are henceforth
superfluous and vulgar.) An enlarg'd general superior humanity, (partly
indeed resulting from those,) we are to build. European, Asiatic
greatness are in the past. Vaster and subtler, America, combining,
justifying the past, yet works for a grander future, in living
democratic forms. (Here too are indicated the paths for our national
bards.) Other times, other lands, have had their missions--Art, War,
Ecclesiasticism, Literature, Discovery, Trade, Architecture, &c.,
&c.--but that grand future is the enclosing purport of the United
States.