The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
First, what is his pedigree? He need not be ashamed to tell; for he
comes of a noble family, the Teutonic,--a family more opulent of human
abilities, and those, for the most part, the deeper kind of abilities,
than any other on the earth at present. He reckons among his
progenitors and relatives such names as Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, the
two Bacons, Lessing, Richter, Schiller, Carlyle, Hegel, Luther, Behmen,
Swedenborg, Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Cromwell, Frederick
II., Wellington, Newton, Leibnitz, Humboldt, Beethoven, Handel, Turner;
and nations might be enriched out of the names that remain when the
supreme ones in each class have been mentioned. Consider what
incomparable range and variety, as well as depth, of genius are here
affirmed. Greece and India possessed powers not equally represented
here; but otherwise these might stand for the full abilities of
mankind, each in its handsomest illustration.--It is remarkable, too,
that our Anglo-American has no "poor relations." Not a scurvy nation
comes of this stock. They are the Protestant nations, giving religion a
moral expression, and reconciling it with freedom of thought. They are
the constitutional nations, exacting terms of government that
acknowledge private right. _Resource_ may also be emphasized as a
characteristic of these nations. Hitherto they have honored every draft
that has been made upon them. The Dutch first fished their country out
from under the sea, and afterwards defended it in a war of eighty
years' duration against the first military power on the globe: two
feats, perhaps, equally without parallel.
Being thus satisfied upon the point of pedigree, we may proceed to
inquire about estate. To what inheritance of land has Nature invited
our New Man? He comes to the country of highest organization, perhaps,
upon either hemisphere. Brazil and China suggest, but probably do not
sustain, a rivalry. What is implied in superior organization will
appear from the items to be mentioned.
1. Elaboration. Central North-America is to an extraordinary degree
worked out everywhere in careful detail, in moderate hill and valley,
in undulating prairie and fertile plain,--not tossed into barren
mountain-masses and table-lands, like that vast desert _plateau_ which
stretches through Central Asia,--not struck out in blank, like the
Russian _steppes_ and the South American _llanos_, as if Nature had
wanted leisure to elaborate and finish. Indeed, these primary
conditions of fertility and large habitability appertain to America, as
a whole, to such degree, that, with less than half the extent of the
Old World, it actually numbers more acres of fertile soil, and can, of
course, sustain a larger population.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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