Lack of originality is a frequent charge against young literatures, but the best foreign critics have testified to the originality of the Knickerbocker Legend, of Leatherstocking, of the great Puritan romances, in which the Ten Commandments are the supreme law, of the work of that southern wizard who has taught a great part of the world the art of the modern short story and who has charmed the ear of death with his melodies, of America's unique humor, so conspicuous in the service of reform and in rendering the New World philosophy doubly impressive.

American literature has not only produced original work, but it has also delivered a worthy message to humanity. Franklin has voiced an unsurpassed philosophy of the practical. Emerson is a great apostle of the ideal, an unexcelled preacher of New World self-reliance. His teachings, which have become almost as widely diffused as the air we breathe, have added a cubit to the stature of unnumbered pupils. We still respond to the half Celtic, half Saxon, song of one of these:—

"Luck hates the slow and loves the bold,
Soon come the darkness and the cold."

American poets and prose writers have disclosed the glory of a new companionship with nature and have shown how we,

"… pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth."

After association with them, we also feel like exclaiming:—

"Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
… rich apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes."

No other literature has so forcibly expressed such an inspiring belief in individuality, the aim to have each human being realize that this plastic world expects to find in him an individual hero. Emerson emphasized "the new importance given to the single person." No philosophy of individuality could be more explicit than Walt Whitman's:—

"The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual,—namely to You."

This emphasis on individuality is an added incentive to try "to yield that particular fruit which each was created to bear." We feel that the universe is our property and that we shall not stop until we have a clear title to that part which we desire. As we study this literature, the moral greatness of the race seems to course afresh through our veins, and our individual strength becomes the strength of ten.

No other nation could have sung America's song of democracy:—

"Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff
that is fine."

The East and the West have vied in singing the song of a new social democracy, in holding up as an ideal a

"… love that lives
On the errors it forgives,"

in teaching each mother to sing to her child:—

"Thou art one with the world—though I love thee the best,
And to save thee from pain, I must save all the rest.
Thou wilt weep; and thy mother must dry
The tears of the world, lest her darling should cry."

True poets, like the great physicians, minister to life by awakening faith. The singers of New England have made us feel that the Divine Presence stands behind the darkest shadow, that the feeble hands groping blindly in the darkness will touch God's strengthening right hand. Amid the snows of his Northland, Whittier wrote:—

"I know not where his islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond his love and care."

Lanier calls from the southern marshes, fringed with the live oaks "and woven shades of the vine":—

"I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God."

The impressive moral lesson taught by American literature is a presence not to be put by. Lowell's utterance is typical of our greatest authors:—

"Not failure, but low aim, is crime."

Hawthorne wrote his great masterpiece to express this central truth:—

"To the untrue man, the whole universe is false,—it is impalpable,—
it shrinks to nothing within his grasp."

Finally, American literature has striven to impress the truth voiced in these lines:—

"As children of the Infinite Soul
Our Birthright is the boundless whole….

"High truths which have not yet been dreamed,
Realities of all that seemed….

"No fate can rob the earnest soul
Of his great Birthright in the boundless whole!"