Very few Americans, however, could bear with Jeffersonian equanimity the imputation of inferiority. All were well aware that they had just achieved a revolution without parallel in history; they were honestly proud of it; and they could not help feeling touchy when their critics, ignoring this stupendous achievement, censured them for failure in fields they had never entered. A few, like Jefferson, would respond, “Give us time;” the majority either masked their irritation under pretended contempt for the opinion of foreigners, or silently admitted the impeachment. There grew up, on the one hand, “spread-eagleism,”--brag over our material and political bigness,--and, on the other, an impatient desire to produce masterpieces which should not fear comparison with the best the world could show. The Hebrew patriarchs, whose faith Jehovah tested by denying them children till the old age of their wives, were not less troubled at the postponement of their dearest wishes than were those eager watchers for the advent of American genius. Long before Bryant’s little volume was published, in 1821, those watchers had begun to speculate as to the sort of work in which that genius would manifest itself, and then was conjured up that bogy, “The American Spirit,” which has flitted up and down through our college lecture-rooms and fluttered the minds of immature critics ever since. It was generally agreed that the question to be asked about each new book should be, “Has it The American Spirit?” and not, “Is it excellent?” Nobody knew how to define that spirit, but everybody had a teasing conviction that, unless it were conspicuous, the offspring of American genius could not prove their legitimacy. Foreigners, especially the English, encouraged this conviction. They expected something strange and uncouth; they would accept nothing else as genuine. Hence, years afterward, when Whitman, with cowboy gait, came swaggering up Parnassus, shouting nicknames at the Muses and ready to slap Apollo on the back, our perspicacious English cousins exclaimed, “There! there! that’s American! At last we’ve found a poet with The American Spirit!” For quite other reasons Whitman deserves serious attention; not for those extravagances which he deluded himself and his unrestrained admirers into thinking were most precious manifestations of The American Spirit. This bogy has now been pretty thoroughly exorcised, its followers being chiefly the writers of bad grammar, bad spelling, and slang,--which pass for dialect stories,--and an occasional student of literature, who finds very little of the American product that could not have been produced elsewhere. We may dismiss The American Spirit, bidding it seek its spectral companion, The Great American Novel, but we must remember that, even before Bryant began to write, it was worrying the minds of our literary folk.