For certain purposes, literary productions through all the recorded ages
may be roughly divided into two classes. The first consisting of only
a score or two, perhaps less, of typical, primal, representative works,
different from any before, and embodying in themselves their own main
laws and reasons for being. Then the second class, books and writings
innumerable, incessant--to be briefly described as radiations or
offshoots, or more or less imitations of the first. The works of the
first class, as said, have their own laws, and may indeed be described
as making those laws, and amenable only to them. The sharp warning of
Margaret Fuller, unquell'd for thirty years, yet sounds in the air:
"It does not follow that because the United States print and read more
books, magazines, and newspapers than all the rest of the world, that
they really have, therefore, a literature."