Democracy has been so retarded and jeopardized by powerful personalities, that its first instincts are fain to clip, conform, bring in stragglers, and reduce everything to a dead level. While the ambitious thought of my song is to help the forming of a great aggregate Nation, it is, perhaps, altogether through the forming of myriads of fully develop’d and enclosing individuals. Welcome as are equality’s and fraternity’s doctrines and popular education, a certain liability accompanies them all, as we see. That primal and interior something in man, in his soul’s abysms, coloring all, and, by exceptional fruitions, giving the last majesty to him⁠—something continually touch’d upon and attain’d by the old poems and ballads of feudalism, and often the principal foundation of them⁠—modern science and Democracy appear to be endangering, perhaps eliminating. But that forms an appearance only; the reality is quite different. The new influences, upon the whole, are surely preparing the way for grander individualities than ever. Today and here personal force is behind everything, just the same. The times and depictions from the Iliad to Shakespeare inclusive can happily never again be realized⁠—but the elements of courageous and lofty manhood are unchanged.