tivation in a colder climate, it has become an herbaceous annual of moderate dimensions, becoming thereby a mere prolific bearer, concentrating its energies within a more limited season, and affording by its small size and the increased facility of harvest, a capacity of productiveness which is very remarkable. Without these practical ameliorations of its nature, it could not have acquired that amazing value as a material for clothing the human family and for other purposes which mark its progress in production, as an era in modern commerce and manufacture. This plant also furnishes us one of the many examples of the increased proportion which the seed bears to the size of the plant, by removal to a colder climate. By such removal it requires, also, the great advantage of a more perfect and ample covering of the seed-the cotton wool-for which, chiefly, it is cultivated. This is provided by nature for its protection in the colder atmosphere into which it has been introduced; and, also, to give it additional power of dissemination to perpetuate its kind. These advantages of climate, in the upper country of our South Atlantic and Gulf States, with Tennessee and Arkansas, are not possessed, as far as we can learn, in any of the regions in which this plant has been extensively cultivated. British India, within reasonable distance of navigation, and the regions of Africa, recommended as favorable to the extensive growth of the plant, are too near the equator to compete with our admirably adapted cotton region. There seems to be a special adaptation of climate in our southern States, to produce the best crops of rice, cotton, sweet-potatoes, melons, peaches, ground-nuts, some kinds of grapes, and some other articles. Whether the production of sugar will, by the increased adaptation of the cane to the climate, become as profitable as in Cuba and other regions exempt from winter frosts, remains to be proved. We believe it will. The sugar-cane in Cuba, even, we have been informed, does not ripen its seed in one season. As a herbaceous plant, therefore, it is north of its original climate. The negro-the chief instrument in the growth of these southern products, furnishes another and a very striking proof of the soundness of our theory. In his native Africa he is a lazy savage, advancing very slowly towards civilization for thousands of years, unless when mixed with other races. What little energy he manifests is in petty warfare to enslave his neighbors. We do not know that there has been any increase in his numbers or any considerable improvement in his condition since history began to speak of him. In our country, he has multiplied, since immi

gration ceased, at a rate which doubles his numbers about every thirty years. In 1800, the United States contained less than one million of the African race, which has increased to about four millions. This great increase is proof of advancement in physical and moral improvement. This is beyond all reasonable question. Transported northward to a climate where labor is a necessity to produce warmth and procure food and clothing, his advance towards civilization, when we consider the generally slow movements of natural ameliorations, has been quite remarkable. Compare the negro of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and the upper country of the States further south, and especially of families longest in America, with the negro in Africa, and observe what improvement the colder climate, necessitating systematic labor, has effected in a few generations. What the lower latitude of the temperate zone is doing to raise the man of the tropics, in muscular and mental power, the higher latitude of the same zone is accomplishing for the white man. In the climate of the best grasses, including the best cereals and the best animals for food and labor, the white man finds his best home and developes his best civilizations. This climate is the continental, the excessive climate of Humboldt. It is distinguished by a wide range of temperature; by cold winters and hot summers. It manifests the very essence of life in the activity of the elements; in its frequent alternations of wet and dry, heat and cold, calms, breezes, and gales. Its vapors, its waters, its winds, its electricity, have constantly active movements, generally conservative, seldom destructive. In it, the man must be active in body and mind, to live in health and produce a healthy progeny, and his activity tends to make him every inch a man. That happy clime of the poets, where perpetual spring decks the meadows with eternal flowers and invites man to repose and sensual enjoyment, could hardly breed warriors, statesmen, philanthropists or poets worthy the name.

It is time to close. If we shall succeed, in this article and others, in preceding numbers of this magazine, in our desire to introduce into the arena of philosophical investigation laws of nature which are not only highly interesting but rich in practical results beneficial to man, we shall be gratified, though there may be exhibited in our theory and the reasons in its support as many errors as there may be left of undeniable truths.

J. W. S.

ART. V.-AMERICAN LETTERS.

UNPLEASANT as the admission may be, it is nevertheless true, that, as a nation, we are destitute of a native literature. Our letters, like our laws, institutions, religion, manners, and customs, are the product of a foreign soil, and like all exotics, exhibit but a forced and sickly growth. We pay the same homage at the shrine of the literary supremacy of Great Britain that we are accustomed to accord to her canons in jurisprudence, or her precedents in legislation; and, like the cultivated but imitative Romans, who preferred to read the great volume of nature and man by the splendid light reflected from the polished genius of Greece, to the labors of founding a literary empire of their own, we, too, are content to explore the domain of mind and matter, by the aid of the shining torch beaming luminously on the altar of British intellectuality. And this is all, in a measure, the legitimate result of the fact that it has been the peculiar misfortune of America never to have enjoyed a national infancy; so true it is that the earliest literary utterances of a people are its rude, national songs, tunefully and passionately shed from fervid minstrel harps, in celebrating, in heroic strains, the grand achievements of a rude patriot ancestry now reposing in the dim twilight annals and legendary memories of the infant commonwealth. These unpolished songs constitute, at once, its poetry, its history, and the sum of its national literary effort. Its splendid Augustan age of critical knowledge, polite and varied erudition, scientific attainment, philosophic subtlety, and varied æsthetic culture, has not yet dawned, but advances in proportion as the light of the positive sciences breaks in upon the empire of imagination, and chases the shadows of superstition from the firmament of mind. Like the stars of heaven, poetic thought acquires darkness, in order to be seen, and an age of speculative activity, and utilitarian tendencies is consequently unfriendly to the growth and development of poetic taste and sensibility, because the aims of positive knowledge are material, while the genius of poetry is spiritual; hence the early poetry of all nations is objective, and is replete with the purest and divinest inspiration, while that which characterizes the genius of a cultivated and enlightened, and, at the same time, practical age, is eminently subjective or metaphysical. Homer paused over the more familiar forms and striking aspects of nature, as exhibited in the majestic swell and restless movements of the many-voiced ocean, the rush of the winged tempest, the stormcloud rent by the fury of the lightning, or, man contending

against the force of physical ills, or defying the hostility of the fates; but with Eschylus, who represents a more intellectual age of Grecian culture, and learning, philosophy, and speculation passed into poetry; and the theme of his minstrelsy is the analysis of the tumultuous emotions and passions, and the subtle motives that determine the actions of inen, and influence the destinies of nations. Chaucer and Spencer modulated their "golden shells" to the witching inspirations hanging around the shadowy legends and superstitious mythologies of a rude, gothic, and chivalrous age, abounding in the highest elements of poetry, and the melody of their verse touched a chord of exquisite sensibility that vibrated to the heart of the nation; but when Wordsworth and Tennyson sweep their kindling lyres, no strains of that divinest melody are evoked by the labored minstrelsy; for, with The Excursion and The Princess, metaphysics assumes the sceptre of Poetry; and didactic stanzas, full of subtlest verbiage and most learned refinement of scientific distinction and analysis, aspire to breathe the divine afflatus, and kindle the etherial flame of poetic inspiration. Speculative subtlety and philosophic precision have entered and violated the penetralia of the sacred temple, prostrating, with iconoclast hands, the relics and images of the ancient faith, and unveiling to the vulgar gaze the form and presence of divinity itself.

Poetry is not the creature of intellectation, but the offspring of a pathematic state of mind, whose modes of expression and forms of utterance are embodied in the language of pure imagery; and if for this the language of ideas be attempted to be substituted, the spirit of poetry vanishes, and skilful and melodious versification usurps the abdicated throne; and the celestial Pegasus, shorn of his wings, is soon condemned to the prosaic drudgery of the cart. Poetry, too, as a divine influence, or affection, is a purely religious sentiment, and not a cold, abstract, theological conviction; and as such, addresses itself not to the reasoning faculties, but makes its appeals to the emotional nature of man; and although an enlightened nation may boast of the splendor of its literature, the glory of its science, the perfection of its arts, yet will the light of its imaginative endowment have sustained an eclipse, and its susceptibility to the entertainments of poetic taste, and the divine creations of imaginative art, will have decayed in proportion as the star of its civilization has receded from the night of its na tivity, to be bathed in the kindling splendors of an intellectual day. Not that poetical objects will have ceased to abound, but

that the faculty necessary for perceiving and appreciating them, will have been extinguished by the utilitarian interests and influences of a material age; positivism being even more fatal to its existence than metaphysical or theological systems and ideas. It is the poetical literature that gives shape and character to the literary genius of a nation. Shakespeare was the grand epitome of ten centuries of his country's greatness and intellectuality, and the power of his genius will continue to influence and control the empire or civilized thought as long as the monuments of recorded language survive. And being a vigorous Banyan offshoot of the great Ancestral Empire, we are the immediate inheritors of her literary monuments and artistic renown; and, as such, the fires of our intellectuality will always be kindled at British altars; and the splendid triumphs of her civilization, the noble creatures of her arts, and the brilliant achievements of her literary genius, we will ever be proud to claim as our own, though, politically, constituting separate nationalities, yet, in thought, in language, in the soft bonds of polite letters, we are as one people, looking back to the same proud ancestry, venerating the same great names, rejoicing in the same illustrious memories, and viewing the foundation of American Colonies in the Western Hemisphere as only a brilliant episode in the progressive history of free British institutions. If we cannot boast of a distinct American literature, we can at least point, and that too without any derogation to native endowment, pridefully to the literary glory of Great Britain, with the same complacent feelings that a child would reverence the honors and virtues of a parent. Of a poetical literature, we are as well as destitute; but in the less ambitious and more ordinary department. of imaginative or fictitious literature, we maintain a respectable rank. The only American poem presenting any claims to the designation of native, or which can be regarded in the light of a purely indigenous production, is the Hiawatha of Mr. Longfellow. There are numerous and clever poems from the pens of native writers, but their originals can all be found in some old English classic. Change but the names and date, and the poem of Miles Standish would present as true a picture of Old as of New England. At the head of our modest school of imaginative writers stands the name of Washington Irving, yet all his most graceful and polished productions were penned in a foreign land, and addressed to foreign audiences. He is the representative literary character of his country, and with the single exception of Cooper and Simms, is the only professional