In this view of the case, may we not ask whether this base and cruel attempt at subduing Kansas has not gone far enough? Have not the circumstances shown that it is as impracticable as it is base and cruel? Or are we to see the despotism of the New World as insanely obstinate as the despotisms of the Old? Is there no warning, no instruction, to be derived from the examples of those older nations? An eloquent historian has recently depicted for us, in scenes which the memory can never lose, the mad attempts of the House of Stuart to Romanize England, to the loss of the most magnificent dominion the world ever saw; and another historian, scarcely less eloquent, has drawn a series of fearfully interesting pictures of the stern efforts of the Spaniards to impose a detested State and a more detested Church upon the burghers of the Netherlands. The spirit of James II., and the spirit of Philip II., was the same spirit which is now striving to force Slavery and Slave Law upon Kansas; and though the field of battle is narrower, and the scene less conspicuous, the consequences of the struggle are hardly of less moment. Kansas is the future seat of empire; she will yet give tone and law to the entire West; and they who are fighting there, in behalf of humanity and justice, do not fight for themselves alone, but for a large posterity.
The brave old Poets sing of nobler themes Than the weak griefs which haunt men's coward souls. The torrent of their lusty music rolls Not through dark valleys of distempered dreams, But murmurous pastures lit by sunny streams; Or, rushing from some mountain height of Thought, Swells to strange music, that our minds have sought Vainly to gather from the doubtful gleams Of our more gross perceptions. Oh, their strains Nerve and ennoble Manhood!--no shrill cry, Set to a treble, tells of querulous woe; Yet numbers deep-voiced as the mighty Main's Merge in the ringdove's plaining, or the sigh Of lovers whispering where sweet streamlets flow.
To speak of English Art was, ten years ago, to speak of something formless, chaotic, indeed, so far as any order or organization of principles was concerned,--a mass of individual results, felt out, often, under the most glorious artistic inspiration, but much oftener the expression of merely ignorant whim, or still more empty academic knowledge,--a waste of uncultivated, unpruned brushwood, with here and there a solitary tree towering into unapproachable and inexplicable symmetry and beauty. Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Turner are great names in Art-history; but to deduce their development from the English culture of Art, one must use the same processes as in proving Cromwell to have been called up by the loyalty of Englishmen. They towered the higher from contempt for the abasement around them. If there was greatness in measure in English Art, it was greatness subjected to tradition and conventionalism. The three artists we have just named were the only great freemen, in the realm of Art England had known down to the close of the first half of the nineteenth century; and of these, Turner alone has left his impress on the Art succeeding his.