Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[88] contributor need hope to cover two pages of a magazine with what might be adequately said in one, unless he assumes his editor to be as foolish as himself. The Spartans exiled Ctesiphon for bragging that he could speak the whole day on any subject selected; and a modern periodical is of little value, unless it has a Spartan at its head.

Strive always to remember — though it does not seem the plan of the universe that we should quite bring it home to ourselves — that “To-day is a king in disguise,” and that this American literature of ours will be just as classic a thing, if we do our part, as any which the past has treasured. There is a mirage over all literary associations. Keats and Lamb seem to our young people to be existences as remote and legendary as Homer, yet it is not an old man's life since Keats was an awkward boy at the door of Hazlitt's lecture-room, and Lamb was introducing Talfourd to Wordsworth as his own only admirer. In reading Spence's “Anecdotes,” Pope and Addison appear no further off; and wherever I open Bacon's “Essays,” I am sure to end at last with that one magical sentence, annihilating centuries, “When I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in the flower of her years.”

And this imperceptible transformation of the commonplace present into the storied past applies equally to the pursuits of war and to the serenest works of peace. Be not misled by the excitements of the moment ¹ into overrating the charms of military life. In this chaos of uniforms, we seem to be approaching times such as existed in England after Waterloo, when the splenetic Byron declared that the only distinction was to be a little undistinguished. No doubt, war brings out grand and