For you, at least, are young;
'no hungry generations tread you down,' and the past does not weary
you with the intolerable burden of its memories nor mock you with
the ruins of a beauty, the secret of whose creation you have lost.
That very absence of tradition, which Mr. Ruskin thought would rob
your rivers of their laughter and your flowers of their light, may
be rather the source of your freedom and your strength.
To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance
of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the
sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, has been
defined by one of your poets as a flawless triumph of art. It is a
triumph which you above all nations may be destined to achieve.
For the voices that have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not
the chosen music of Liberty only; other messages are there in the
wonder of wind-swept height and the majesty of silent deep -
messages that, if you will but listen to them, may yield you the
splendour of some new imagination, the marvel of some new beauty.
'I foresee,' said Goethe, 'the dawn of a new literature which all
people may claim as their own, for all have contributed to its
foundation.
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