As regards the mental and moral character of our people, it could be fairly shown that among all the influences affecting it, those of sun and soil are radically the most forcible. The vast and varied resources of our territory have made us a nation of energetic workers and traders. The lower faculties of our minds have been so excited by the prospects and opportunities which commerce has displayed and discovered to us, on all sides, that the rest of these faculties, in sight of such a wonderful business and the great ends to which it is tending, engage also in the excitement, and Science, Art, Poetry, Philosophy, Religion even, move down gladly to join the great and manifold march of our destinies. Whatever amount of social greatness, enterprise and far speculation distinguishes us from the other nations, is certainly owing to our continental place upon the surface of the globe—this moral _pou sto_, whence we may yet be enabled to move the whole world in a variety of ways. Our minds seem to grow to the measure of this territory, and to represent, in its capacities, the material resources of the empire in all their affluence and incompleteness.
Science and general intercourse will, doubtless, do a great deal in time, in the way of obliterating nations’ distinctives. But these can never wholly pass away before the moral advances of civilization. In the human economy, in fact, it would seem that the principle of variety which we find at work every where in the universe, is just as necessary and good as in the material scheme of things. Man must always, more or less, bear the character of those elements by which he is surrounded.
[1] Natural History of the Human Species; by Lieut. Col. C. H. Smith. Reprint, Boston. Gould & Kendall.
Music; where soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory. Shelley.
She knew me not, although her breast Had pillowed oft my head, And thought I long had been at rest With Ocean’s ghostly dead. Full on my wan and wasted face She fixed her melancholy gaze; But there, alas! she could not trace The look of other days.
She knew me not! the flight of time An iron form will bow, And bondage in a tropic clime Had darkened cheek and brow: I spoke of friends; with look cast down, Who shared her joy in better hours— Whom Death had added to his crown Of darkly folded flowers:—