These
rapid sailers must be arraigned as the conspicuous agents in the
immense and increasing intercourse between the old and the new
continents. We go to school to Europe. We imbibe an European taste.
Our education, so called, -- our drilling at college, and our reading
since, -- has been European, and we write on the English culture and
to an English public, in America and in Europe. This powerful star,
it is thought, will soon culminate and descend, and the impending
reduction of the transatlantic excess of influence on the American
education is already a matter of easy and frequent computation. Our
eyes will be turned westward, and a new and stronger tone in
literature will be the result. The Kentucky stumporatory, the
exploits of Boone and David Crockett, the journals of western
pioneers, agriculturalists, and socialists, and the letters of Jack
Downing, are genuine growths, which are sought with avidity in
Europe, where our European-like books are of no value. It is easy to
see that soon the centre of population and property of the English
race, which long ago began its travels, and which is still on the
eastern shore, will shortly hover midway over the Atlantic main, and
then as certainly fall within the American coast, so that the writers
of the English tongue shall write to the American and not to the
island public, and then will the great Yankee be born.
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