Can we spare these great tonics? It is the experience of history that all religious bodies are purified by persecution, and materialized by peace. No amount of accumulated virtue has thus far saved the merely devout communities from deteriorating, when let alone, into comfort and good dinners. This is most noticeable in detached organizations,--Moravians, Shakers, Quakers, Roman Catholics,--they all go the same way at last; when persecution and missionary toil are over, they enter on a tiresome millennium of meat and pudding. To guard against this spiritual obesity, this carnal Eden, what has the next age in reserve for us? Suppose forty million perfectly healthy and virtuous Americans, what is to keep them from being as uninteresting as so many Chinese? I know of nothing but that aim which is the climax and flower of all civilization, without which purity itself grows dull and devotion tedious,--the pursuit of Science and Art. Give to all this nation peace, freedom, prosperity, and even virtue, still there must be some absorbing interest, some career. That career can be sought only in two directions,--more and yet more material prosperity on the one side. Science and Art on the other. Every man's aim must either be riches, or something better than riches. Now the wealth is to be respected and desired, nor need anything be said against it. And certainly nothing need be said in its behalf, there is such a vast chorus of voices steadily occupied in proclaiming it. The Instincts of the American mind will take care of that; but to advocate the alternative career, the striving of the whole nature after something utterly apart from this world's wealth,--it is for this end that a stray voice is needed. It will not take long; the clamor of the market will re-absorb us to-morrow. It can scarcely be said that Science and Art have as yet any place in America; or if they have, it is by virtue of their prospective value, as with the bonds of a Pacific railway. I use the ordinary classification, Science and Art, though it is literature only of which I now aim to speak. For under one of these two heads all literature must fall; it may be either a contribution to science through its matter, or to art through its form. The _form_ of literature is usually called _style_ and of the highest kind of literature, called poetry or _belles-lettres_, the style is an essential, and almost the essential part. It is in this aspect that the matter is now to be considered,--literature as an art.