to a cheering prophecy of Mr. Grimké, are to throw into the shade, as intellectual beings, the Newtons and the La Places, no less than the Euclids and the Apolloniuses, we shall scarcely be satisfied with their improvements in Geometry, unless they begin by demonstrating its axioms. We take up all questions de novo, and treat every subject of general speculation and philosophy, no matter how frequently and fully discussed, or how solemnly decided elsewhere, as what is called at the bar res integra, that is to say, as fair game for criticism and controversy. Besides this, we may be permitted to observe, while we are upon this topic, that the pleasant exhortation, mon ami, commence par le commencement, seems to have been made expressly for our use. We are for coming out on all occasions, not only with the truth, but the whole truth, and seem utterly unable to comprehend the reason of that peevish rule, Nec reditum Diomedis ab interitu Meleagri, Nec gemino bellum Trojanum orditur ab ævo. For instance, it would not surprise us much if a member of Congress from one of the more enlightened, because less ancient and prejudiced States, should introduce a speech upon the Colonial Trade by a brief' account of Columbus and his discoveries, as it is every day's experience to see even our leading politicians lay hold of the most casual and ordinary questions of commerce and finance, to spout whole vo lumes of the merest rudiments and generalities of political economy. There are some people, we dare say, in this censorious world, who would be apt to consider all this as outrageously rational; but, perhaps, after all, it will not do in so new a country to adopt old ideas and assume established truths-and no one, we humbly conceive, can address the American public with effect, who is not himself patient enough to begin at the very beginning, and to accommodate his mode of discussion to this decided national predilection for elementary enquiry, and regular and exact demonstration according to the utmost rigour of the logical forms.' The article which these remarks introduce ás on "Classical Learning," which is somewhat in ill-odour with the busy and utility seeking people of the United States. The argument for the cultivation of an acquaintance with the great writers of antiquity, is forcibly, and sometimes eloquently, put;-and we can forgive the reviewer for being a little hard upon his countrymen, when we find them indulging in such declamation as that of Mr. Grimké, who delivers predictions like these to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Carolina. "I fear not the great names of Archimedes, Aristotle and Plato, of Demosthenes and Cicero, of Tacitus, and Thucydides. I know that we must excel them. I fear not the greater names of Bacon and Newton, of Locke, But ler, Hume and Robertson, Chatham, Burke, and Pitt. I know that we shall surpass them also!" Bravo! Mr. Grimké. The reviewer settles this grandiloquent gentleman very quietly:"We solemnly protest against all and sin gular, the sentences in a certain note of Mr. Grimké's, beginning with Dr. Dwight was wont to say;' or 'the author of the British Spy hath said;' or even, 'the younger Lord Lyttleton (in letters, by-the-bye, which he did not write) has not hesitated to say,' &c. Dr. Timothy Dwight we have always been taught to consider as a very able man, especially in theology-and we have not the least doubt, that the present Attorney General of the United States is quite a formidable antagonist at the bar. But, really, when we are sitting in judgment in the exercise of a self-constituted jurisdiction, upon Homer and Sophocles, or Demosthenes and Tully, it is too much to expect that we should receive exactly, as the responses of an oracle, the dicta of such a poet as the author of Greenfield Hill, or of such & writer as the biographer of Patrick Henry." But let us hear the American prophet again: What, though my country should never produce a Homer or a Virgil, a Phidias or an Raphael, Tasso and Shakspeare, may never Apelles! What, though Michael Angelo and brought forth men, greater and better, wiser have a rival in our land; yet have we already and more valuable, than the poet, the painter, the statuary, and the architect. Even at this day, have we done more for the solid, permanent, rational happiness of man, than all the artists that ever lived. One eitizen, the fruit and and peaceful, wise and free, is worth more lo example of institutions virtuous, benevolent his family, his social circle, his country, than the clouds of Aristophanes, the group of the Rhodian sculptors, or the transfiguration of Raphael. If the sons of Cornelia were her jewels, each citizen free, educated, and happy is to America, a pearl above price. concurrence o spread influence of moral wisdom and of in "The time is fast coming when the wide structed common sense, shall assign to poetr and the fine arts, a rank far below that which they have held from a singular circumstances, in the judgment of the world When this consummation shall have been fu filled, the poet and the artist, however em nent, shall be classed far below the statesma and orator, the philosopher and historian." The answer of the reviewer is capital;-an of itself ought to make us pause, before we a tempt to speak lightly of the taste, and t attainments of the writers of America: "We really cannot, with a clear conscienc undertake to promise that Greek and Lat will make better artisans and manufacturers, more thrifty economists; or, in short, more ful and skilful men in ordinary routine of li or its mere mechanical offices and avocation We should still refer a young student of la aspiring to an insight into the mere craft a mystery of special pleading, to Saunders' ports, rather than to Cicero's Topics; itinerant field preacher would, doubtless, abundantly greater edification, and, for purposes, more profitable doctrine, in hon John Bunyan, than in all the speculations the lyceum and the academies; and we conscientiously believe, that not a single co more or less, of yellow fever, would be cu and the goodness that has clothed all nature by the faculty in this city, for all that Hippocrates and Celsus have said, or that has been ever said (or sung) of Chiron and Esculapius. It is true, their peculiar studies would not be hurt, and might, occasionally, even be very much helped and facilitated by a familiar acquaintance with these languages; and what would they not gain as enlightened and accomplished men! But it is not fair to consider the subject in that light only. It is from this false state of the controversy that the argument of Mr. Grimké derives all its plausibility. We, on the contrary, take it for granted in our reasonings, that the American people are to aim at doing something more than 'to draw existence, propagate, and rot.' We suppose it to be our common ambition to become a cultivated and a literary nation. Upon this assumption, what we contend for, is, that the study of the classics is and ought to be an essential part of a liberal education,-that education of which the object is to make accomplished, elegant, and learned men,-to chasten and to discipline genius, to refine the taste, to quicken the perceptions of decorum and pro-ridge quaintly, yet, we think, felicitously expriety, to purify and exalt the moral sentiments, to fill the soul with a deep love of the beautiful both in moral and material nature, to lift up the aspirations of man to objects that are worthy of his noble faculties and his immortal destiny:-in a word, to raise him as far as possible above those selfish and sensual propensities, and those grovelling pursuits, and that mental blindness, and coarseness, and apathy, which degrade the savage and the boor to a condition but a little higher than that of the brutes that perish. We refer to that education and to those improvements, which draw the broad line between civilized and barbarous nations, which have crowned some chosen spots with glory and immortality, and covered them all over with a magnificence that, even in its mutilated and mouldering remains, draws together pilgrims of every tongue and of every clime, and which have caused their names to fall like a breathed spell' upon the ear of the generations that come into existence, long after the tide of conquest and violence have swept over them, and left them desolate and fallen. It is such studies, we mean, as make that vast difference, in the eyes of a scholar, between Athens, their seat and shrine, and even Sparta, with all her civil wisdom and military renown, and have (hitherto, at least,) fixed the gaze and the thoughts of all men, with curiosity and won. der, upon the barren little peninsula between Mount Citharon and Cape Sunium, and the islands and the shores around it, as they stand out, in lonely brightness and dazzling relief, amidst the barbarism of the west, on the one hand, and the dark and silent and lifeless wastes of oriental despotism, on the other. Certainly we do not mean to say, that in any system of intellectual discipline, poetry ought to be preferred to the severe sciences. On the contrary, we consider every scheme of merely elementary education as defective, unless it develop and bring out all the faculties of the mind, as far as possible, into equal and harmonious action. But, surely, we may be allowed to argue, from the analogy of things, presses it, the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge.' It appears not only in those combinations of creative genius of which the beau idéal is the professed object, but in others that might seem at first sight but little allied to it. It is spread over the whole face of nature, it is in the glories of the heavens and in the wonders of the great deep, in the voice of the cataracts and of the coming storm, in Alpine precipices and solitudes, in the balmy gales and sweet bloom and freshness of spring. It is in every heroic achievement, in every lofty sentiment, in every deep passion, in every bright vision of fancy, in every vehement affection of gladness or of grief, of pleasure or pain. It is, in short, the feeling-the deep, the strictly moral feeling, which, when it is affected by chance or change in human life, as at a tragedy, we call sympathy-but as it appears in the still more mysterious connexion between the heart of man and the forms and beauties of inanimate nature, as if they were instinct with a soul and a sensibility like our own, has no appropriate appellation in our language, but is not the less real or the less familiar to our experience on that account. It is these feelings, whether utterance be given to them, or they be only nursed in the smitten bosom,-whether they be couched in metre, or poured out with wild disorder and irrepressible rapture, that constitute the true spirit and essence of poetry, which is, therefore, necessarily connected with the grandest conceptions and the most touching and intense emotions, with the fondest aspirations and the most awful concerns of mankind. For instance, religion has been in all ages and countries the great fountain of poetical inspiration, and no harps have been more musical than those of the prophets. What would Mr. Grimké say of him whose lips were touched by one of the seraphim with a live coal from off the altar? or does he expect the day to come when the wide spread influence of moral wisdom and instructed common sense' shall assign to the Psalms, or the book of Job, in the library of a cultivated mind, a lower place than to Robertson and Hume? Milton pronounces our sage and serious poet Spenser,' a better teacher than Scotus and Aquinas; and, in another place, has expressed himself to the same effect so admirably, and, for our present purpose, so appositely, that we cannot refrain from citing the whole passage: To which (viz. logic,) poetry should be made subsequent, or, indeed, rather precedent, as being less subtile and fine, and more simple, sensuous, and passionate. I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not but have hit on before, among the rudiments of grammar, but that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian Commentaries of Castlevetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the great masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play writers be, and show them what religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of poetry both in divine and human things.'-(Tract on Education.) for he has gone at once, in his next article, to "the Principles of Husbandry," and talks, very sensibly, about the rotation of crops and manures. A controversial article on the execution of the American, Colonel Hayne, by Lord Rawdon (Moira), contains many curious allegations, which we cannot attempt to follow. The first number of this work certainly displays much variety of talent; for we have papers on the calculus, phrenology, political economy, colonization, and mineralogy;-and we must conscientiously say they appear to us each executed with talent and learning that reflect honour on the source from which American literature has sprung. The second number contains a very powerful article on "the Constitution of the United States," the object of which is, calmly but firmly, to resist the encroachments which the Northern States of the Union have gradually been making on the Southern. The close of this article will indicate its temper and feeling: The union of the States has been from the first assemblage of delegates in 1774, to the present hour, the wish, the hope, the ardent aspiration of every patriot of America. It has grown with our growth, it has strengthened with our strength. It has become a feeling rather than a principle. It is mingled with every calculation of our future greatness or felicity, with every anticipation of permanent prosperity or of national glory. It has been cherished in no portion of our country with more devotion than in the south; it has been supported no where with more unanimity and disinterestedness. In all the questions which have agitated our country, one only excepted, this section of the union has been, if not passive, at least defensive in its position. The only measure engendering acrimonious feel "We have enlarged the more upon this head, because we have uniformly observed, that those who question the utility of classical learning, are, at bottom, equally unfavourable to all elegant studies. They set out, it is true, in a high-flown strain, and talk largely about the superiority of modern genius. But the secret is sure to be out at last. When they have been dislodged, one by one, from all their literary positions, they never fail to take refuge in this cold and desolate region of utility. They begin by discoursing magnificently of orators, poets, and philosophers, and the best discipline for forming them, and end by citing the examples of A, the broker, or B, the attorney, or C and D, members of Congress, and what not, who have all got along in the worldings, which has ever been brought forward by without the least assistance from Latin and Greek. Just as if every body did not know that, as that sage moralist Figaro has it, pour avoir du bien le savoir faire vaut mieux que le savoir, and just as if our supposed great men had troubled their heads any more about the exact sciences and modern literature, than about the classics, or were not quite as little indebted to Newton, to Milton, or to Tasso, as to Virgil and Tully, and just as if an argument which proves so much were good for any thing at all!" This is a long passage; but we quote it without any remorse, not only because it is splendidly (perhaps too ambitiously) written, but because it illustrates very much the state of opinions in the United States. That those of Mr. Grimké should be the most current amongst a young and prosperous nation is very natural-but it is something when we can find a writer, like the Southern reviewer, so fearlessly and ably stemming them. It is really astonishing how some men resolve to consider elegance as naturally dissociated from power; as if the seimitar of Saladin was not as tremendous a weapon as the battle-axe of Richard. The Southern Reviewer has proved that, in defending classical learning, he is not disposed to neglect the claims of practical utility; the people of the Southern States, was our late war with Great Britain; and that war, if we except those sentiments of national honour,. which we know are common to every portion of our country, was undertaken altogether for Northern interests, for the protection of commerce and navigation, not of agriculture. The South suffered by it, most severely, but it has never repented of its sacrifices; and our citizens are still prepared to make great concessions to friendship and to peace. In every event that may occur, they will have the proud boast of having done nothing to disturb the harmony of the Union. No discordant note will originate with them. If ever a separation of the States shall take place, it will only occur when some portion of the confederation shall find the government no longer one of equal rights or equal benefits; when it shall discover that the Constitution will no longer afford to all, protection for their property, nor security for their lives." "If ever that evil day should arrive, when the Constitution of our country shall offer no barrier to the projects of designing or ambitious men, no limits to the speculations of any one who shall proclaim the general welfare to be his sole end and aim, his guide and his exclusive principle, the right of confiding members of this confederacy may indeed be violated --but not with impunity-and from the errors modern poetry. It was haunted, holy ground' of misguided, even if honest statesinen, pos--breathing inspiration from its caves, and coterity may have to mourn over the fragments of that mighty Republic, which, in its dawn, offered to the world so bright an example, and promised to itself so proud a destiny. There is a very forcible paper on Roman Literature in this number, which appears to us from the same able pen as that of Classical Learning. We are tempted to extract a spirited passage from this article, on the nationality of the literature of Greece and of the south of Europe. It comes with peculiar in terest from an American pen-and from a country where literature must necessarily be catholic rather than national-a reflection of the modes of thought and feeling in the Old World, rather than the exposition of any peculiarities in their own state of society. The United States have sprung up at once into the manhood of civilization, without having toiled to that eminence through the long contests which knowledge, in Europe, has had to wage with brute force, and which contests have left behind them the monuments and the associations upon which a national literature must be formed. The antiquities of North America are to be found in England. vered all over with religious awe. Attica, says Strabo, was a creation and a monument of gods and godlike ancestors. Not a part of it but is signalized and celebrated by history or fiction. Is it any wonder that objects like these, that scenes so full of religion and poetry should have awakened all the enthusiasm of genius, which, in its turn, was to reflect back on them its own glory, and to hallow them with associations still more awful and affecting? The Edipus Coloneus and the Eumenides, both of them written professedly to honour Athens and the Athenians, are memorable examples of a poetry which seems to have been inspired by the event and the place, and to have made both more interesting and impressive. There is reality in all this. The literature of such a people is an essential part of their history as a nation. Its character stands in intimate relation, both of cause and effect to their character. Springing out of their most touching interests and associations-out of what would be called by German critics, their inward life-it deserves to be classed among their most important social institutions. Instead of being, as classical learning once was all over Europe, the business of mere pedants and book-worms, producing no effect whatever upon the mass of mankind-the mighty multitude who feel and act-it is inwoven into the very frame and constitution of society-pervades, informs, warms, quickens it throughout. Men of genius, indeed, experience its first and its strongest impulses; but the people too, and even the populace are very much under its influence. They partake of the enthusiasm that is abroad-they feel, though in a less degree, the same passionate love for that ideal beauty which is the object of the arts, and with somewhat of the same aspirations after excel or feeling rather, which enables them to discern and to enjoy it with all the delicacy and the sensibility of refined taste. These are the causes and the characteristics of a national literature; and there is no example of this kind that will bear to be mentioned in comparison with that of Greece. "Roman literature, especially the earlier Roman literature, which occupies so large a space in the work before us, is far less calculated to inspire enthusiasm, than that of the Greeks, or even that of the South of Europe, especially about the period of the revival of letters. The reason may be given in a single word-it is altogether exotic and imitative. Greek literature, on the contrary, was perfectly original. That wonderful people was, in this respect, at least a primitive race-a nation of αυτοχθονες. There is no trace in their poetry and eloquence of any foreign influence or heterogeneous admixture. With them every thing was barbarous that was not Greek.lence, they acquire an instinctive perception, Their genias drew its inspiration from the liv ing fountains of nature-from the scenes in which it actually noved-from events which immediately affected its own destinies-from opinions that had laid a strong hold on the popular belief-from the exaggerated traditions of an heroic ancestry-from every thing, in short, that is most fitted to excite the imagination, and to come home to the heart, and all its deep and devoted affections. The theme of their matchless Epic was the war which first united them in a great national object, and proved that they were formed to conquer and to subjugate barbarians. The calamities of the Labdacide and the Pelopidæ, furnished the scenes of their gorgeous tragedy.' The animated interest of their Olympic contests in spired the muse of Pindar, and the valour of Harmodius and Aristogiton was celebrated in many a festal hymn, and by many a tuneful lyre. Their elegant and poetical mythology peopled all nature with animated and beautiful forms, and consecrated, ennobled, and adorned the most ordinary objects. A local habitation, a temple, a grove, a grotto-was assigned amidst the scenes of daily toil and the resorts of busy life, to every divinity in their endless calendar. Their Parnassus was no unmeaning common-place--no empty name as it is in our Museum.--Vol. XIV. "The early literature of the South of Europe, to which we alluded above, though not. so perfectly spontaneous and unmixed, is still distinguished by a striking air of originality. It bears the stamp of the times and the manners, The lay of the Troubadour, full of gallantry and sentimental love, was indebted for none of its charms to the lyrical poetry of antiquity. These simple effusions, the first language, perhaps the first lessons of chivalry, breathed a spirit which had never animated the numbers of Anacreon and Tibullus. It was evident, even from them, that a new order of ages was beginning from a new era. The Divina Commedia, the Decamerone, and the Canzoni of Petrarch, although the productions of men who had read more, and who rank among the most renowned votaries and restorers of classical learning, are certainly not formed upon the ancient models. They exhibit all the freedom, the freshness and originality of a primitive literature. Dante, indeed, avows himself a follower, an humble No. 80.-0 follower of Virgil, but no two things can be | more unlike than the original and the supposed copy. The antique grandeur and simplicity of the Eneid, and the perfect regularity of its proportions are not more strikingly contrasted with the wildness and eccentricities of his fable, than its whole spirit and character with the dark, dismal, and dreadful imaginings of the Inferno, or whose dazzling visions of glory and beatitude, which are revealed by Beatrice in the Paradiso. The same thing may be said of Ariosto, and, with all his classic elegance and accuracy, of Tasso too. Their subjects alone are full of poetry. They are such as address themselves most powerfully to the feelings of a modern reader. They are connected with all that we have been taught to consider as most venerable and captivating and imposing in the history of modern society with the Holy Land and the Holy Cross, with the knight and the priest, with palmers and pilgrims, and paladins and peers, with the fierce wars and the faithful loves,' and the thousand other in cidents, consequences and associations, direct or remote, of chivalry and the crusades. There is something like enchantment in the very names of those who are supposed to have figured in this heroic age of the modern world -the heroes and heroines of Turpin's Chronicle. Nor is this altogether due, as some may think, to the elegant fictions into which these rude materials have been wrought up in latter times. The simplest old romaunt or fabliau, has, we confess a secret charm for us as an image, however imperfect, of that interesting state of society, the gentis cunabula nostræ. Imagine Dante and Ariosto to have confined themselves to a bare translation of the cele brated poems of antiquity, or to have attempted the same subjects in a close and studied imitation. With what different feelings would they have been regarded by us; and how much less interest would have been excited by the litera. ry history of that period!" The American periodicals, which we have rapidly noticed, present us with a few favourable specimens of original works published in the United States, particularly in works of imagination. Our Southern reviewer is inclined to be sufficiently severe upon his poetical brethren--and not without justice. The interchange of literature between nations is like the reciprocity of commerce ;each party must profit by it. Although, for many years, England will supply America with books-for the more civilized country will have greater leisure to attend to the luxuries of life, while the settlers, the creators of fresh channels of commerce, the inventors and adapters of machinery must be busy for a century or so, getting their new house in order-it is not therefore to be concluded that we shall derive no advantage from the literature of America. We apprehend that the writers of the United States, with occasional exceptions, will for some time put forth their strength in periodical papers rather than in bulky volumes. They have no literature to create. The wide extent of our common storehouse is open to them ;and they may range, fully and freely, amongst our plenteous garners. They were born in a happy time for the rapid attainment of know ledge. They live in an age of Encyclopedias and all they have to do is to adapt the great mass of information to the leisure and temper of their own people. Science and literature must, in the United States, be for a long time elementary and popular. They have to enclose all the old, fat, blossoming, and fruit-bearing common-fields, before they have occasion to break-up the wastes of knowledge. They will, therefore, reprint all our old glorious writersthe Shakspeares, and Bacons, and Miltons, and Popes, and Swifts, and Burkes-their inheri tance as well as ours. For modern novelties, have they not the Murrays, and Longmans, and Colburns of England, to set their presses going? And, therefore, they will review, for half a century at least. But we shall still be gainers by this process. We shall see how our factitious modes of thought, growing out of our over-refinement in manners, and our intricate system of compromises in politics, will look in the eyes of individuals and communities who are inclined to err in the other excesswho sometimes mistake rudeness for strength, and are too apt to apply the standard of utility to matters which have neither height nor breadth, and cannot be gauged by all the alge bra in the world. We have seen that one of their reviewers-and we think the most ta lented of them-reproaches his fellow-citizens, that they begin from the beginning and take nothing for granted. We, on the other hand, are mightily inclined to pride ourselves upon taking most things for granted, beginning at the practical point, according to our notions of that really ideal halting-place. Now, in our hatred of appearing ignorant, and of being sus pected of moving in our leading-strings, both in learning and politics, we sometimes utterly forget those general principles of liberty and all that, for instance, which no refinement. real or imaginary, ought to allow us to neglect The mirror of American literature may some times very happily show us, what a prim, af fected, strait-laced, effeminate and powerless thing is that public mind," which goes on refining," till it has lost all relish for the plain food from which it must derive its strength and minces along, the shadow of a shade. "powdered as for a feast," but "rank and foc within," amidst all its perfumes. American literature will be for many years to the English as the bold, sometimes rude, but honest and substantial yeoman, is to the polite, perchanc sarcastic, but elegant and accomplished favou ite of the opera-box. The one tells a plai tale in homely and vigorous language-doe not repress his natural curiosity when he see any thing wonderful or new-and is ofte abundantly provoking with his rather ignoras boasting upon the subject of his own imperfec acquaintance with men and books, and mo matters of taste. The other disdains to me tion any single thing by its right namemains in ignorance of any unfamiliar obje rather than request to be informed-and most contemptuously loud in his abominati of all those persons and matters which co duce to the ordinary comforts and satisfactio of life. Now these two individuals might lea a great deal of each other-if each wo abate a little of exclusiveness and arrogance |
