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We need this conviction of nationality as a faith, to be absorb'd in the blood and belief of the People everywhere, south, north, west, east, to emanate in their life, and in native literature and art. We want the germinal idea that America, inheritor of the past, is the custodian of the future of humanity.
I ought not to offer a record of these days, interests, recuperations, without including a certain old, well-thumb'd common-place book, filled with favorite excerpts, I carried in my pocket for three summers, and absorb'd over and over again, when the mood invited. Such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand. H. D. Thoreau. If you hate a man, don't kill him, but let him live.
I feel, with dejection and amazement, that among our geniuses and talented writers or speakers, few or none have yet really spoken to this people, created a single image-making work for them, or absorb'd the central spirit and the idiosyncrasies which are theirs and which, thus, in highest ranges, so far remain entirely uncelebrated, unexpress'd.
I, too, can hardly tell why, but as I enter'd the city in the slight haze of a late September afternoon, and have breath'd its air, and slept well o' nights, and have roam'd or rode leisurely, and watch'd the comers and goers at the hotels, and absorb'd the climatic magnetism of this curiously attractive region, there has steadily grown upon me a feeling of affection for the spot, which, sudden as it is, has become so definite and strong that I must put it on record."
Went to-day to see this just-finish'd painting by John Mulvany, who has been out in far Dakota, on the spot, at the forts, and among the frontiersmen, soldiers and Indians, for the last two years, on purpose to sketch it in from reality, or the best that could be got of it. Sat for over an hour before the picture, completely absorb'd in the first view.
Suppose these books becoming absorb'd, the permanent chyle of American general and particular character what a well-wash'd and grammatical, but bloodless and helpless, race we should turn out!
In the first place no poet on record so fully bequeaths his own personal magnetism, nor illustrates more pointedly how one's verses, by time and reading, can so curiously fuse with the versifier's own life and death, and give final light and shade to all. At any rate it has come to be an impalpable aroma through which only both the songs and their singer must henceforth be read and absorb'd.
Whatever may be said of the few principal poems or their best passages it is certain that the overwhelming mass of poetic works, as now absorb'd into human character, exerts a certain constipating, repressing, indoor, and artificial influence, impossible to elude seldom or never that freeing, dilating, joyous one, with which uncramp'd Nature works on every individual without exception.
Indeed there seem to be three of us. For nearly an hour I indolently look and join them while they dart and turn and take their airy gambols, sometimes far up the creek disappearing for a few moments, and then surely returning again, and performing most of their flight within sight of me, as if they knew I appreciated and absorb'd their vitality, spirituality, faithfulness, and the rapid, vanishing, delicate lines of moving yet quiet electricity they draw for me across the spread of the grass, the trees, and the blue sky.
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