_I'm a vast batch left to oblivion_.
In its highest aspect, and striking its grandest average, essential
Poetry expresses and goes along with essential Religion--has been and
is more the adjunct, and more serviceable to that true religion (for of
course there is a false one and plenty of it) than all the priests and
creeds and churches that now exist or have ever existed--even while the
temporary prevalent theory and practice of poetry is merely one-side and
ornamental and dainty--a love-sigh, a bit of jewelry, a feudal conceit,
an ingenious tale or intellectual _finesse_, adjusted to the low taste
and calibre that will always sufficiently generally prevail--(ranges of
stairs necessary to ascend the higher.)
The sectarian, church and doctrinal, follies, crimes, fanaticisms,
aggregate and individual, so rife all thro' history, are proofs of the
radicalness and universality of the indestructible element of humanity's
Religion, just as much as any, and are the other side of it. Just as
disease proves health, and is the other side of it.... The philosophy of
Greece taught normality and the beauty of life. Christianity teaches how
to endure illness and death. I have wonder'd whether a third philosophy
fusing both, and doing full justice to both, might not be outlined.
It will not be enough to say that no Nation ever achiev'd materialistic,
political and money-making successes, with general physical comfort, as
fully as the United States of America are to-day achieving them. I know
very well that those are the indispensable foundations--the _sine
qua non_ of moral and heroic (poetic) fruitions to come. For if those
pre-successes were all--if they ended at that--if nothing more
were yielded than so far appears--a gross materialistic prosperity
only--America, tried by subtlest tests, were a failure--has not advanced
the standard of humanity a bit further than other nations. Or, in plain
terms, has but inherited and enjoy'd the results of ordinary claims and
preceding ages.
Nature seem'd to use me a long while--myself all well, able, strong and
happy--to portray power, freedom, health. But after a while she seems to
fancy, may-be I can see and understand it all better by being deprived
of most of those.
How difficult it is to add anything more to literature--and how
unsatisfactory for any earnest spirit to serve merely the amusement of
the multitude! (It even seems to me, said H. Heine, more invigorating to
accomplish something bad than something empty.)
The Highest said: Don't let us begin so low--isn't our range too
coarse--too gross?... The Soul answer'd: No, not when we consider what
it is all for--the end involved in Time and Space.
Essentially my own printed records, all my volumes, are doubtless but
off-hand utterances f'm Personality spontaneous, following implicitly
the inscrutable command, dominated by that Personality, vaguely even if
decidedly, and with little or nothing of plan, art, erudition, &c. If I
have chosen to hold the reins, the mastery, it has mainly been to give
the way, the power, the road, to the invisible steeds. (I wanted to see
how a Person of America, the last half of the 19th century, w'd appear,
but quite freely and fairly in honest type.)
Haven't I given specimen clues, if no more? At any rate I have written
enough to weary myself--and I will dispatch it to the printers, and
cease. But how much--how many topics, of the greatest pointand cogency,
I am leaving untouch'd!