Critical Essays and Literary Notes Author:Bayard Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FITZ-GEEENE HALLECK. Dedication Of The Halleck Monument, At Guilford, Conn., July Sth, 1869. WE have been eighty years an organized nation, ninety-three ye... more »ars an independent people, more than two hundred years an American race, and to-day, for the first time in our history, we meet to dedicate publicly, with appropriate honors, a monument to an American poet. The occasion is thus lifted above the circle of personal memories which inspired it, and takes its place, as the beginning of a new epoch in the story of our culture. It carries our thoughts back of the commencement of this individual life, into the elements from which our literature grew, and forward, far beyond the closing of the tomb before us, into the possible growth and glory of the future. The rhythmical expression of emotion, or passion, or thought, is a need of the human race—coeval with speech, universal as religion, the prophetic forerunner as well as the last-begotten offspring of civilization. Poetry belongs equally to the impressible childhood ofa people and to the refined ease of their maturity. It is both the instinctive effort of nature, and the loftiest ideal of Art, receding to farther and farther spheres of spiritual Beauty, as men rise to the capacity for its enjoyment. But our race was transferred, half-grown, from the songs of its early ages and the inspiring associations of its Past, and set here, face to face with stern tasks, which left no space for the lighter play of the mind. The early generations of English bards gradually become foreign to us; for' their songs, however sweet, were not those of our home. We profess to claim an equal share in Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, but it is a hollow pretence. They belong to our language, but we cannot truly feel that they belong to us as ...« less