This beautiful
result must be credited to literature also in casting its account.
In looking at the library of the Present Age we are first
struck with the fact of the immense miscellany. It can hardly be
characterized by any species of book, for every opinion old and new,
every hope and fear, every whim and folly has an organ. It prints a
vast carcass of tradition every year, with as much solemnity as a new
revelation. Along with these it vents books that breathe of new
morning, that seem to heave with the life of millions, books for
which men and women peak and pine; books which take the rose out of
the cheek of him that wrote them, and give him to the midnight a sad,
solitary, diseased man; which leave no man where they found him, but
make him better or worse; and which work dubiously on society, and
seem to inoculate it with a venom before any healthy result appears.
In order to any complete view of the literature of the present
age, an inquiry should include what it quotes, what it writes, and
what it wishes to write. In our present attempt to enumerate some
traits of the recent literature, we shall have somewhat to offer on
each of these topics, but we cannot promise to set in very exact
order what we have to say.
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