_Philadelphia, Nov. 4, 1834_.
"I thank you truly for your obliging attention in sending to me the two
numbers of your 'SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER,' which I have read with
much satisfaction. I look with a deep interest and pleasure upon every
effort to raise up the literary character of our country; to lay the
foundations of a pure and sound taste, and to stimulate our native
genius to develop and strengthen its powers. In the encouragement of
these attempts, we should all act and feel as the citizens of the
American republic, disregarding sectional divisions, and undisturbed by
questions of state rights and constitutional scruples and
constructions. Here we should be a consolidated people, and whether the
candidate for fame be a native of the north or south, the east or west,
we should claim him as our own, belonging to all alike. When I hear of
the establishment of a seminary of learning; of a scientific or
literary publication; of an invention in the arts; in short, of any
thing which sheds abroad the light of American genius and power, its
particular location is, with me, quite a secondary consideration,
scarcely, indeed, considered at all. It is enough for me that I can say
to the supercilious European, _this is American_.
"With these sentiments, you may be assured that I wish success to your
endeavor to rouse the spirit of the South in the cause of literature;
to draw its intellectual energies from the everlasting and monotonous
discussion of politics, which has run the same round of topics and
arguments for forty years, and to allure her favored sons and daughters
to the kinder and brighter fields of science and letters. If you shall
be able to continue as you have begun, your subscribers will be amply
remunerated for their patronage, and your contributors may be proud to
see their lucubrations on your pages. It is well that you do not
confine yourself to original compositions, but mix them with judicious
and interesting selections from works of established reputation.
Repeated experience has shewn that an editor cannot depend much upon
the voluntary contributions of our own writers, however friendly to his
design, who are too much occupied with their own concerns and the
serious business of life, to be relied on as the support of such an
enterprise as yours.... We have not yet a class or body of _authors by
profession_; writing is the occupation of hours snatched from business,
or the amusement of the few who have leisure for indulgence."