Apparently we have no great living poets; for various reasons we have no dramatists of note; of novelists who are at least possibilities, we have several. What will be the type of the American novel of the future? Probably it is rash to make any prediction; but one may venture to believe that the prevailing attitude of our future novelists will be that of a sane and optimistic realism. The morbid books like “The Jungle” do not wear well; and, while such books may have their use in promoting needed reforms, they do not constitute additions to literature and can, therefore, secure no permanent place. The pleasant paths of romance will always tempt bold and imaginative writers; but they will be more than ever restrained by the demand of enlightened readers that they shall not wander far from the probable, and shall present, clear and undistorted, the best there is in the actual present. That there are immense possibilities in the varied and complex life of to-day, few will doubt; that the great artists are to appear who will make the most of these opportunities we may assume with confidence. III. THE POETS =English Influence on American Poetry.=--If we accept the popular belief, and identify poets with makers of verse, it must be allowed that American poetry at its best--in the nineteenth century--is in a peculiar sense unoriginal and derivative. To be derivative, to have a traceable pedigree, may, indeed, be no disadvantage, either for a national or an individual genius. In their way, all modern literatures are derivative and unoriginal; not merely influenced by each other, but ultimately dependent for the sources of their inspiration upon the basal civilisations of Palestine and Greece. “We are all Greeks,” said Shelley. Milton might have said, “We are all Hebrews.” And our best American poets might have added, “_We_ are all Englishmen.” Particular scenes on this continent, and the vast and ever growing extent of our territory, have both left their impress on our poets during the last five generations; they have touched the poetry of ten or twelve decades here and there with the undeniable stamp of reality, and given it now and then a largeness of range and freedom of atmosphere very proper to a nation whose sense of geography has been so elastic. Yet one can hardly say that our natural scenery has ever been really incarnate in our literature as a whole, or that a pervasive national spirit, a spirit at once large and precise, has entered fundamentally into our verse. What has been most effectual in our literature has been closely imitative, has followed at a little distance, yet step for step, the development of the English literature from which it sprang. This continuous imitation, now more superficial, now more indirect and elusive, has been the mainspring of our poetry even more than our prose, during the century just gone by.