The permanent and instantial literature of America is not national in this sense. It has little that is American; it might as well be written by some book-wright in Leipsic or London, and then imported. The individuality of the nation is not there, except in the cheap, gaudy binding of the work. The nationality of America is only stamped on the lids, and vulgarly blazoned on the back. Is the book a History? it is written with no such freedom as you should expect of a writer, looking at the breadth of the world from the lofty stand-point of America. There is no new philosophy of history in it. You would not think it was written in a democracy that keeps the peace without armies or a national jail. Mr. Macaulay writes the history of England as none but a North-Briton could do. Astonishingly well-read, equipped with literary skill at least equal to the masterly art of Voltaire, mapping out his subject like an engineer, and adorning it like a painter, you yet see, all along, that the author is a Scotchman and a whig. Nobody else could have written so. It is of Mr. Macaulay. But our American writer thinks about matters just as everybody else does; that is, he does not think at all, but only writes what he reads, and then, like the good-natured bear in the nursery story, "thinks he has been thinking." It is no such thing, he has been writing the common opinion of common men, to get the applause of men as common as himself. Is the book of Poetry? the substance is chiefly old, the form old, the allusions are old. It is poetry of society, not of nature. You meet in it the same everlasting mythology, the same geography, botany, zoölogy, the same symbols; a new figure of speech suggested by the sight of nature, not the reading of books, you could no more find than a fresh shad in the Dead Sea. You take at random eight or ten "American poets" of this stamp, you see at once what was the favorite author with each new bard; you often see what particular work of Shelley, or Tennyson, or Milton, or George Herbert, or, if the man has culture enough, of Goethe, or Uhland, Jean Paul, or Schiller, suggested the "American Original." His inspiration comes from literature, not from the great universe of nature or of human life. You see that this writer has read Percy's Reliques, and the German Wunderhorn; but you would not know that he wrote in a republic--in a land full of new life, with great rivers and tall mountains, with maple and oak trees that turn red in the autumn, amongst a people who hold town-meetings, have free schools for everybody, read newspapers voraciously, who have lightning rods on their steeples, ride in railroads, are daguerreotyped by the sun, and who talk by lightning from Halifax to New Orleans, who listen to the whippoorwill and the bobolink, who believe in Slavery and the Declaration of Independence, in the devil and the five points of Calvinism. You would not know where our poet lived, or that he lived anywhere. Reading the