The New World receives with joy the poems of the antique with European feudalism’s rich fund of epics, plays, ballads⁠—seeks not in the least to deaden or displace those voices from our ear and area⁠—holds them indeed as indispensable studies, influences, records, comparisons. But though the dawn-dazzle of the sun of literature is in those poems for us of today⁠—though perhaps the best parts of current character in nations, social groups, or any man’s or woman’s individuality, Old World or New, are from them⁠—and though if I were ask’d to name the most precious bequest to current American civilization from all the hitherto ages, I am not sure but I would name those old and less old songs ferried hither from east and west⁠—some serious words and debits remain; some acrid considerations demand a hearing. Of the great poems receiv’d from abroad and from the ages, and today enveloping and penetrating America, is there one that is consistent with these United States, or essentially applicable to them as they are and are to be? Is there one whose underlying basis is not a denial and insult to democracy?

What a comment it forms, anyhow, on this era of literary fulfilment, with the splendid day-rise of science and resuscitation of history, that our chief religious and poetical works are not our own, nor adapted to our light, but have been furnish’d by far-back ages out of their arrière and darkness, or, at most, twilight dimness! What is there in those works that so imperiously and scornfully dominates all our advanced civilization, and culture?