A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads

divine works that today stand ahead in the world’s reading, but dozens more, transcend (some of them immeasurably transcend) all I have done, or could do. But it seem’d to me, as the objects in Nature, the themes of aestheticism, and all special exploitations of the mind and soul, involve not only their own inherent quality, but the quality, just as inherent and important, of their point of view , the time had come to reflect all themes and things, old and new, in the lights thrown on them by the advent of America and democracy⁠—to chant those themes through the utterance of one, not only the grateful and reverent legatee of the past, but the born child of the New World⁠—to illustrate all through the genesis and ensemble of today; and that such illustration and ensemble are the chief demands of America’s prospective imaginative literature. Not to carry out, in the approved style, some choice plot of fortune or misfortune, or fancy, or fine thoughts, or incidents, or courtesies⁠—all of which has been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excell’d⁠—but that while in such aesthetic presentation of objects, passions, plots, thoughts, etc. , our lands and days do not want, and probably will never have, anything better than they already possess from the bequests of the past, it still remains to be said that there is