Greece, Rome, and Judaea are gone by forever, leaving to generations
the legacy of their accomplished work; China still endures, an old-
inhabited house in the brand-new city of nations; England has already
declined, since she has lost the States; and to these States,
therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark possibilities, and grown,
like another Eve, from one rib out of the side of their own old land,
the minds of young men in England turn naturally at a certain hopeful
period of their age. It will be hard for an American to understand
the spirit. But let him imagine a young man, who shall have grown up
in an old and rigid circle, following bygone fashions and taught to
distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now suddenly hears of a
family of cousins, all about his own age, who keep house together by
themselves and live far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine
this, and he will have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with
which spirited English youths turn to the thought of the American
Republic. It seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was
still conducted in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it
had not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted,
like some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume forms
of procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial.
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