What should have been asked of us, at least after the defeat of the Federalist party had made certain, what before was only probable, that America would become a democracy, was a literature which should express the ideals pervading our particular brand of democratic life, a literature which should describe a society in which social distinctions were elastic, opportunity was superabundant, and, for the first time in the modern world, the common people become more powerful than the uncommon. A democratic literature could rightly have been expected from America. But such a literature would never have been termed “sublimest thought” by our early enthusiasts. It would have to suffer from the tawdriness of the masses, and develop as slowly as they develop. It would have to be more prose than poetry, for American life outwardly was prosaic except upon its borders, and often gross and barbarous there. It would have to struggle upward like a flapping heron, not soar like the eagle of our dreams. And in the earlier period, perhaps in most periods of the republic, few literary dreamers even wished that America should become a democracy. In many respects we got, and got very soon, such a literature, and much of it has endured. The prose or poetry that took upon itself to let the eagle scream for liberty has quite generally gone into oblivion, and with reason; it is either crude and blatant, or solemn and hackneyed pretentiousness, like Barlow’s “Columbiad” and much of Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan.” The “less enraptured” strains of Irving and Hawthorne and Clemens and Holmes and Bret Harte, in which the hopes, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies, and the passions of a nascent civilization were expressed in prose as well as poetry, and in humor more frequently than in epic grandeur, have had a thousand times more virility. They have sprung from a social and esthetic need, not a romantic conception, and though not an epoch-making celebration of freedom finally brought to earth, they have been a solid contribution to the literature of the world and a beginning of the literature of the American democracy. The real issue of course was not Freedom and Liberty and the other capitalizations of the abstract, but we, the Americans. And the real question is whether American literature has met its proper, not its assumed, specifications. If one considers the past, the answer inclines toward the affirmative.