[35] _A Biography of William Cullen Bryant_, by Parke Godwin, i, 154.
Bryant’s list contains the name of not one poet whose works are read to-day. All these volumes belong to _fossil literature_,--literature, that is, which may be dug up and studied for the light it may throw on the customs of a time, or its intellectual development, but which, so far as its own vitality is concerned, has passed away beyond hope of resuscitation. The historical student of American poetry may read Barlow’s “Columbiad” as a matter of duty; but those of us to whom poetry is the breath of life will not seek it in that literary graveyard. Reverently, rather, will we read the titles on the tombstones and pass on.
Almost coeval with American independence itself was the notion that there ought to be an independent American literature. The Revolution had resulted in the formation of a republic new in pattern, in opportunities, in ideals; a republic which, having broken forever with the political system of Britain, would gladly have been freed from all obligations--including intellectual and æsthetic obligations--to her. We hardly realize how acute was the sensitiveness of our great-grandfathers on this point. The satisfaction they took in recalling the victories of Bennington and Yorktown vanished when they were reminded--and there was always some candid foreigner at hand to remind them--that a nation’s real greatness is measured, not by the size of its crops, nor by its millions of square miles of surface, nor by the rapidity with which its population doubles, nor even by its ability to whip King George the Third’s armies, but by its contributions to philosophy, to literature, to art, to religion. “What have you to show in _these_ lines?” we imagine the candid foreigner to have been perpetually asking; and the patriotic American to have winced, as he had to reply, “Nothing;” unless, indeed, he happened to have Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical poise. To the slur of Abbé Raynal, that “America had not produced a single man of genius,” Jefferson replied: “When we shall have existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will inquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded that the other countries of Europe and other quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any name of ours on the roll of poets.”