At the same time, the United States must not be searched for that which distinguishes man above the other beings of creation, for that which constitutes his certificate of immortality and the ornament of his days: literature is unknown in the new republic, although called for by a multitude of institutions. The American has replaced intellectual by positive operations. Do not impute to him as an inferiority his mediocrity in the arts, for it is not in that direction that he has turned his attention. Cast through various causes upon a desert soil, he made agriculture and commerce the first objects of his cares: before thinking, one must live; before planting trees, one must fell them, in order to till the ground. The primitive colonists, it is true, their minds steeped in religious controversy, carried the passion for disputation into the very heart of the forests; but it was necessary for them first to shoulder their axes and march to the conquest of the desert: their sole pulpit, in the intervals between their labours, was the elm they were engaged in squaring. The Americans have not passed through the ages of other nations: they left their childhood and their youth in Europe; the artless words of the cradle were unknown to them; they enjoyed the delights of home only through the medium of their regrets for a native land which they had never seen, and of which they mourned the eternal absence and the charm they had heard of from others. The new continent has no classical literature, nor romantic literature, nor Indian literature: for the classical, the Americans have no models; for the romantic, no middle-ages; I for the Indian, the Americans despise the savages and loathe the sight of the woods as of a prison to which they were once condemned. And thus it comes that literature as a thing apart, literature properly so-called, does not exist in America; what one finds is applied literature, answering to the different needs of society: the literature of workmen, merchants, sailors, farmers. Americans succeed in mechanics and science, because science has its material side. Franklin[523] and Fulton[524] took possession of lightning and steam for the benefit of mankind. It fell to America to endow the world with the discovery, thanks to which no continent can henceforward escape the mariner's search. Poetry and imagination, the portion of a very small number of idlers, are regarded in the United States as puerilities appertaining to the first and to the last age of life. The Americans have had no childhood and have as yet had no old age. [Sidenote: The American presidents.]