Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta,: written by her friends. With selections from her correspondence and from her writings in prose and poetry.

anne C. X. Votta
life will demand a corresponding new expression. If poetry con sists in the glorification of war, in the expression of national or
personal ambition, or in the delineation of man as he is or as
he has been, we may not perhaps look for a nobler literature
than the world now possesses. But if, as some believe, the
high office of the poet is not to idealize the world as it is, but
to proclaim that the ideal is the real, the true and only real,
then there will dawn on humanity the splendor of a new day.
De Tocqueville, in his " Democracy in America," says in refer ence to our literature: "While the principle of democracy has
dried up most of the old springs of poetry, it has disclosed new
ones. The idea of progression, of indefinite perfectability, belongs to a democratic people. They care little for what has been,
but their imagination of what will be, opens the widest range to
the genius of the poet and to visions of the ideal: the march of
a great people across the continent, subduing nature and peopling its solitudes. While the life of the nation is unpoetical, the
underlying thought is full of poetry. Hitherto, incidents in the
life of a nation or an individual have formed the subjects of the
great epics; but the destinies of mankind will be the theme of
the future. Looking at the human race as one great whole, its
destinies regulated by the same design, they recognize in each
individual traces of that universal and eternal plan on which
God rules our race. Passions and ideas will be the subject of
poetry rather than persons and achievements,-man seen for a
moment on the verge of two abysses and disappearing. Poetry
will not be fed with legends or old traditions-the poet will
not people the universe with supernatural beings in whom he
and his readers have ceased to believe, nor coldly personify virtues and vices; but the destinies of mankind, man himself in the
presence of nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his
propensities, and his wretchedness, will afford new and vast
themes for poetry."
Among many other charges, our foreign critics accuse us of
national conceit, of boasting loudly of our country and of its institutions; but if the sketch here presented of the nations which
have preceded us in history is correctly drawn, if our country
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