[272] built. The man who constructs a great mechanical work helps literature, for he gives a model which shall one day inspire us to construct literary works as great. We do not wish to be forever outdone by the iron machinery of Pittsburg or the grain elevators of Chicago. We have hardly yet arrived at our literature,--other things must come first; we are busy with our railroads, perfecting the vast alimentary canal by which the nation assimilates raw immigrants at the rate of a million a year. We are not yet producing, we are digesting; food now, literary composition by-and-by; Shakespeare did not write Hamlet at the dinner table. It is of course impossible to explain this to foreigners, and they still talk of composing, while we talk of dining.
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[272] built. The man who constructs a great mechanical work helps literature, for he gives a model which shall one day inspire us to construct literary works as great. We do not wish to be forever outdone by the iron machinery of Pittsburg or the grain elevators of Chicago. We have hardly yet arrived at our literature,--other things must come first; we are busy with our railroads, perfecting the vast alimentary canal by which the nation assimilates raw immigrants at the rate of a million a year. We are not yet producing, we are digesting; food now, literary composition by-and-by; Shakespeare did not write Hamlet at the dinner table. It is of course impossible to explain this to foreigners, and they still talk of composing, while we talk of dining.
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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