of violence; the atmosphere of the Gaelic hills is peopled with phantoms, every lake has its fay, every cavern its enchanter: the shadow of Bruce wanders through those sombre chapels; the name of Wallace sounds with the sough of the wind through these ruined arches.

The United States, by a phenomenon which we have just explained, wants that dawn and penumbra which give perspective. The very tongue is not native to the soil; it has crossed the sea, and naturalized itself on that side the ocean. To preserve the purity of their style, American writers are forced to keep their regards constantly fixed upon the mother country where are found their types and their models. If they innovate, they fear vulgarity or emphasis. In this respect they are like those modern writers, who use a dead language, and fancy that they can thus restore to us Cicero, Demosthenes, Livy; forgetting that it is the social life of a people which gives energy and life to a language, and that an idiom detached from national society and manners, is a branch detached from the tree, and deprived of its sap. Scotland, even, is proud of her dialect: she has her poet Burns, whose inspiration was at once extinguished when he became unfaithful to the patois of his province.

The republicans of the United States, a virgin people, full of grandeur, whose struggle with nature is not yet ended; all of whose energy must necessarily be directed to the foundation of cities and the development of industry; a nation whose Future is their country; who have no Past-hardly born and already a giant—which had no infancy, no childhood, and whose maturity precedes its youth-not recognizing in their history any of those transitions from feebleness to virility; any of those epochs, the chain of which, ornamented by tradition, receives later, the consecration of poetry.

Here are soldiers, legislators, artisans, a strong, noble race

sufficient for to-day. The first of her Franklin.

Poets will be born, hereafter.

writers is an artisan-legislator, it is

SECTION III.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN-SIR JOHN CREVECŒUR-LETTERS OF AN

AMERICAN PLANTER-JONATHAN EDWARDS.

I have already spoken of Franklin, type of the national genius; consummate politician, subtle dialectician, a lover of the useful. His style has the qualities of his thought good sense, lucidity, benevolence, delicate and sportive unction. He addresses himself neither to souvenirs, nor to hopes; not one shadow of passion mingles with his language. It is rustic and pleasing, a prudence which smiles. Call him prosaic and vulgar, it will not offend his shadow. His charming "Parable against Persecution," his " Poor Robin," a manual written for an infant people, whose leading-strings still guide its uncertain march; his "Examination before the Privy Council" are chefs-d'œuvre of political sagacity. One finds there, under ingenuous and ingenious forms, the suppleness of a most rare mind.

A little while before the American Revolution broke out, a book-now little known-appeared, the tone and style of which are characteristic-"The Letters of an American Cultivator." Sir John Crevecoeur, author of this work, published under the pseudonym of Hector St. John, merits an honorable place in the list of modern writers. Landscape, manners, language, sentiment, all are essentially American The existence of the colonist is reproduced with energy and

simplicity; neither epithet nor coloring is exaggerated. You find not only the objects, but also the sensations and ideas of a new country; you see the author attaching his child's wagon to the plough which he guides, and so conducting along the furrows traced by the share, his little one and his plough, while his wife, seated under a tree at the other end of the field, knits the woollen vestments for the winter. In another place you have a duel between two serpents, the recital of which is grave and solemn as a battle of Homer; the author's strong impressions are all revealed by the style; he could not have chosen nobler words, had his heroes been Hector and Patroclus. He has vivid and graceful shading for whatever strikes him; he does not paint Nature in his closet, nor make himself a descriptive poet, but as he sees her, so he repeats her. He does not busy himself about what the saloons of London or Paris may think of his work; or whether the journals will criticise it. With what good will he mingles in the amusements of the Nantucket people! What alacrity, what a power of industry and labor are in his pages; his heart beats in unison with every heart; how he compels us to associate ourselves with the perils of the whale-fishery; to take interest in the joyous feasts which reward those perils! How admirable in all latitudes are those two things, Strength and Joy! And is it not a rare and remarkable talent to paint them so as to make the reader share in them? This writer, so little read, attains in some parts of his work to a degree of dramatic interest very uncommon. The American war is about to break out; the low murmurs of the tempest rumble from afar; the Indians are menacing to raise the warwhoop and to pour down upon the inland plantation. The colony, hardly formed, may fall. These presagings sadden you; and when you close the book, you have need to be reassured by History and to convince yourself that the terrors of

how

the Colonist have not been realized, that the Colonial Hercules has strangled the serpents which attacked his cradle.

The third remarkable writer whom we encounter in the literary annals of America, is a logician whose celebrity does not seem to have been widely propagated in Europe, but whose merits cannot be denied. Jonathan Edwards, an ecclesiastic, born in Massachusetts, has written a "Treatise on the Will," which ranks him with the subtlest writers. It is a man who does not wish to persuade you but to convince himself. He has not a subterfuge, not an evasion, not a sophism. If an objection presents itself he does not strive, either to disguise or enfeeble it. Read him, and you will think Hobbes dogmatic and Priestly insolent. It is with perfect good faith that he tries to clear up the inextricable difficulties into which his thought is plunged as soon as he approaches the theories of Free will.

In these three writers you admire a fertile naïveté, a happy facility, a ripened, sagacious reason-but no imagination. The American Cultivator only, by the freshness of his pictures, exhibits a sort of originality.

Franklin is like Fenelon, Bunyan, Addison. In Jonathan Edwards there is something of the firm, neat, pressing argument of Descartes; impassioned eloquence and poetic imagination are wanting to the whole three.

SECTION IV.

GOUVERNEUR MORRIS-THE AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT-PARIS OBSERVED FROM 1789 TO 1792 BY A FOUNDER OF THE AMERICAN CONFEDERATION.

Imagination is not found either in Gouverneur Morris, a diplomatist, a distinguished observer, an intelligent and an honest man, endowed with a quick enough sagacity, a right judgment, and a coolness which serves him in a crisis, and which permits him to pass peaceably through the French Revolution.

Morris never exposed himself rashly; never went to meet danger; but when there was necessity, urgency, duty, he halted, showed a calm face and braved the peril; it is one of the finest qualities of the American character. His speeches in Congress and his notes contributed powerfully to the good organization of the confederate democracy, and above all of American finance. Friend of Washington, he became intimate with every one of those strangers who offered their services to the new Republic during its struggle-the Marquis de Lafayette-" The others," (says Washington, in a letter to Morris,) " are adventurers whom the waste of their own resources sends to us, or spies paid by foreign governments to watch our movements, or men whose souls are given up to a vain desire of glory, which would make them sacrifice the holiest interests to their personal ambition."

When that great and fine Revolution of America, so little stained with innocent blood, so noble and so grave, was terminated, and Washington, instead of seeking the first rank in the new federal empire, sought by every honest means to