Young Americans
Not the David Bowie song, but nineteenth-century United States literature.
Rob James
June 12, 2026
Having covered the Transcendentalists and fellow travelers (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson) in one post and Henry and William James in another, it is high “Compensatory Culture” time that I record my reactions to other American literary figures of my country’s first full century. Again, I am just an enthusiastic amateur turning or returning to these works without formal training, just reporting my own experience. Again again, spoilers galore abound: if you are intent on making your own journey, then “horseman, pass by!”
Many ink bottles (or toner cartridges or screen pixels) have been expended in declaring some Grand Theme across all of American literature. Just on my own bookself, it appears either (i) we are too young to have a mature culture with the necessary traditions, class structure and institutions (D. H. Lawrence, Lionel Trilling, even Lee Kuan Yew on a political parallel), or (ii) our majority population is too hung up on childhood, prudery, sex and violence (Leslie Fielder’s “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck, Honey!”). I prefer Alfred Kazin’s synthesis, which folds in the immigrant experience and influence (at high risk in 2026 and not just in the United States).
With all due cautions against Grand Themes in general, my own conclusion, from my rapid read-through of American literature, is that much of it features what I would call the crafting of a faith system out of found materials. By a “faith system” I mean the set of ways adopted by the main character of getting through life and fulfilling a purpose. By “found materials” I mean that character’s environment, family and intimate friends, the America that is, and the America that could be.
Washington Irving (1783-1859). It was in seventh grade that I read the twin-tower excerpts from the Sketch Book. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow treats Ichabod Crane rather cruelly, presumably in favor of the town braggart. As with my reaction to Steve and Billy being rehabilitated in Stranger Things after they were mean to weaker students, I don’t like seeing bullies prosper. The Disney cartoon was pretty scary. Rip Van Winkle is a metaphor for anyone who lives to see soul-crushing technology thanks to living too long. Irving also popularized the terms “Gotham” and “Knickerbocker,” a flying St. Nicholas, and the notion that all considered the world flat until Colombus. He was rated “over-rated” by Poe and others, faulted for pandering to then current English sensibilities.
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). Lots of adventurous Leatherstocking Tales, among which is The Last of the Mohicans (1826) about the French and Indian Wars when tribes took sides. All I’ve done is see the fine 1992 movie on an airplane (don’t knock it). The Mohicans helping fight the French are Chief Chingachgook and his son Uncas, names I knew from (now discontinued) Scouting Order of the Arrow ceremonies. (One of the two British women has African grand-parentage, and the hero Natty Bumppo himself is more of the wild than of his English roots. Uncas is the “last” because no more “pureblood” Mohican women live. There is thus a surprising racial focus in this early American work.)
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878). We grade-schoolers were bayonet-marched through the ponderous poem Thanatopsis (“consideration of death”). The Algonquin Round Table wits had a “Young Men’s Upper West Side Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Poker Club,” in which my favorite knight Robert Benchley did not participate. He did write the funny poker essay “Ladies Wild!”, which I reprint in my Benchley collection (available on amazon.com if not at better bookstores everywhere).
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). The most popular American poet of the century, he taught at Harvard and pursued many genres, though he is best known for village or wilderness settings. The poems are larded with heavily moralistic messaging, and they have been disparaged by many moderns who prefer allusion and obscurity. Poe well observed that Longfellow might have current admirers, but would be denied the Future. Still, Robert Frost called one of his books A Boy’s Will [“is the wind’s will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts”]. I expected to race through Longfellow’s work, but slowed down for days, in order to savor many childhood memories.
My all-time favorite, lack of irony be darned, is The Builders. As an Eagle Scout, I cornily concur that character is what you do even when no one is looking. “In the elder days of Art,/Builders wrought with greatest care/Each minute and unseen part;/For the Gods see everywhere.”
I cannot believe the number of earworms that originate with him. I love “I heard the bells on Christmas Day” as set to guitar by John Gorka. The Acadian Evangeline dwells in “the forest primeval.” The Wreck of theHesperus is a maudlin cautionary tale of going to sea at all, while Excelsior exhibits the stupidity of climbing a frigging mountain in the snow (pace the New York State motto).
The “American Edda” Hiawatha’s trochaic tetrameter imitates that of the Finnish Kalevala, which itself was a recent recreation. The phrase “By the shores of Gitchee Gumee,/By the shining Big-Sea-Water” calls to my Boomer mind the ancient Hamm’s Beer commercial with the tom-tom-tom-tom drumming of the cartoon bear. The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (you know, “listen my children and you will hear,” “one if by land, two if by sea”) turns out to be part of a kind of Yankee Decameron with several speakers spinning Tales of a Wayside Inn. It’s the first of those tales, kind of a hard act to follow (as it turns out based on reading the other tales … unfollowable).
In The Courtship of Miles Standish, when Pilgrim John Alden pitches the tongue-tied soldier’s woo, Priscilla Mullins says “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” Standish ultimately gallantly gives way like the singer in Bread’s 1970s classic Diary. Not a sore loser, he’s a far better man than I ever was in that sad but all-too-human situation!
The hits keep coming. The Children’s Hour (apparently six p.m. or so) is occasioned by “the patter of little feet.” “I shot an arrow into the air” was parodied during a murder of a balloonist suffragette in the film Kind Hearts and Coronets: “She fell to earth in Berkeley Square.” “Under a spreading chestnut-tree/The village smithy stands.” Ships that pass in the night. Into each life a little rain must fall. The lonely striver’s footprints on the sands of time. Though the mills of God grind slowly. Autumn is when “The moon glides along the damp mysterious chamber of the air, and somber houses are hearsed with plumes of smoke.”
There, that’s many more famous lines than I can recall from much greater poets! It was an un-ironic joy to revisit his works.
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). A staunch champion of abolition and temperance, Whittier is not well known today. Barbara Frietchie, about an old woman in Frederick, Maryland who refuses to take down her Union flag when Robert E. Lee passes (“‘Shoot if you must this old grey head,/But spare your country’s flag,’ she said”), was so popular that Winston Churchill could recite it by heart. My mother taught it to me early on, so that I instantly knew its author in a 1969 grade-school exercise without needing the week Mrs. Lund gave us to research it! There is also Barefoot Boy “with cheek of tan.” Maud Muller has the famous line, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen/The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” Bret Harte riposted: “If, of all words of tongue and pen,/The saddest are, ‘It might have been,’/More sad are these we daily see:/‘It is, but hadn’t ought to be.’”
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). A failure in life (military, publishing) by traditional measures. At age 26 married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia (see Annabel Lee, cited by Nabokov in Lolita). His letters home were said to be full of self-pity. I didn’t know Poe dabbled in cosmology, fairly decently for the time.
The inter-poet barbs fly, “Thunderbolts on Olympus.” Poe ridiculed transcendentalists’ “obscurity/mysticism for obscurity/mysticism’s sake.” Emerson “saw nothing” in The Raven, calling Poe a “jingle man”; Aldous Huxley labeled Poe vulgar and gaudy, like a man who wears a diamond ring on every finger. W. H. Auden said he was an “unmanly man” whose love-life consisted of crying upon laps. For Leslie Fielder, Poe’s characters are bereft of the pitched awareness of sin, hence have no moral weight; Melville’s Ahab bleeds real blood, while Poe’s characters are coated in red-colored-corn-syrup movie blood.
One of the best openers in all literature: “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.” Haunted homes have a rich heritage—from Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables down to Stephen King’s (or Stanley Kubrick’s) The Shining. The abode and the family of Roderick and Madeleine are poisoned “houses,” and as the twins fall so does the structure, much like that in King’s Carrie.
I flew through the others, too ornate and precious for my reading appetite these busy days. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (deductions of a great detective as revealed to an amiable companion vis-a-vis an obtuse constable—sound familiar, A. Conan or Agatha?); The Masque of the Red Death (nobility will not save you); The Pit and the Pendulum (Spanish Inquisition auto-da-fé relieved by arrival of French in the Napoleonic Peninsular Wars); The Tell-Tale Heart (the awful truth beats beneath the floorboards); The Gold-bug (invisible ink and secret codes); The Purloined Letter (where you might least expect it). My other favorite is The Cask of Amontillado, the ultimate revenge story—my friend Rhett Jenkins and I loved this puppy in junior high school. We didn’t know nemo me impune lacessit meant “no one insults me without punishment,” but we would shout, “For the love of God, Montressor!”
The poetry came first to me through my mother. To One in Paradise (“where thy [grey] eye glances”—quoted by Bruce Wayne to Catwoman in the campy 1966 Batman movie!); The Raven (Poe said the death of a beautiful woman, spoken of by a bereaved lover, is the most poetic topic in the world; in his after-the-fact Philosophy of Composition, Poe praised the sound of “Lenore” and “cellar door”); Eldorado (“ride, boldly ride”); Annabel Lee (the “kingdom by the sea” cited in Lolita and Play Misty for Me); To Helen (“the glory that was Greece/And the grandeur that was Rome”); The Conqueror Worm; The Bells (my mother’s favorite poem to read aloud, a lost pastime).
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896). Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) is a powerful morality play, with the saintly Tom and Eva and the evil Simon Legree. It stirred many emotions North and South (and in Britain), and its moral I do not question. But after skimming and reading about the book itself, frankly I don’t see much literary value.
Richard Henry Dana (1815-1882). Two Years Before the Mast (1840). The title “before the mast” refers to the ordinary sailor who sleeps in the forecastle while the captain and officers dock in the stern. A Harvard student who did this instead of the European tour that wealthier classmates made. Left Boston 1834 on the brig (two-masted) Pilgrim around Cape Horn to California; returned 1836 on the brig Alert, both under a tyrannical captain. It’s a candid picture of the boredom of life at sea. Here is an exciting excerpt:
Monday, Nov. 10th. During a part of this day we were hove to, but the rest of the time were driving on, under close-reefed sails, with a heavy sea, a strong gale, and frequent squalls of hail and snow.
Tuesday, Nov. 11th. The same.
Wednesday. The same.
Thursday. The same.
But it is at the same time a gripping story of oppressed men in dangerous conditions, especially both crossings south of Cape Horn and a chronicle of encounters with new ethnicities (Sandwich Islanders (Hawai’ians), and Hispanics self-described gente de razón contrasting themselves with indigenous peoples). Its afterword is an eloquent plea for (i) fair treatment of sailors in exchange for their temperance and moral and intellectual improvement and (ii) better enforcement after the fact on shore against captains who abused their (admittedly necessary) powers at sea. Dana put his career where his pen was—as a lawyer he championed the sailors’ cause. The work influenced Melville in style and construction.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892). The electric, uniquely American poetry is found in various editions of Leaves of Grass. Started in 1855 as only twelve poems, which were generously greeted by Ralph Waldo Emerson at the beginning of his “great career” (and as the continuation of Emerson’s own thought, which by 1855 had frankly petered out). By the “deathbed” edition Leaves of Grass had 400 poems, some of extraordinary length, with additional prose inserts. Free verse, vaguely Biblical meter. “You can’t really understand America without Walt Whitman,” who was also said to be our Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. Swinburne likened him to William Blake. On the other hand, Whitman was considered “trashy, profane, obscene,” “stupid filth,” and a “charlatan” (that last one hits close to home; he strikes me as a bit of a poseur). Anyway, here goes, many earworms.
I hear America singing. The song of the open road (quoted by my Salinas friend Joe Fassio and me in our 1976 guide to Monterey County campsites—“The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose”). Dead poets (I’ll have to watch the Robin Williams movie again, O Captain Keating!). Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. O pioneers! (Willa Cather) Out of the cradle endlessly rocking. When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer [doing math, I stepped out and] look’d up in perfect silence at the stars (Richard Feynman would disagree—the science adds to the beauty rather than detracting from it).
Song of Myself (1 every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you; 5 one of the Clinton stanzas (loose the stop from your throat, head to my beard); 24 unscrew the locks from the doors! (Allen Ginsburg’s Howl); 31 leaf of grass no less than the journey-work of the stars; 33 free companion (Inara in Joss Whedon’s Firefly ‘verse); 47 I am the teacher of athletes (justifying me by their surpassing me); 48 a pantheistic God is not greater than one’s own self is; 50 Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.); 52 I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last lines are “Missing me one place search another,/I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
The often-banned scandalous Children of Adam section: I Sing the Body Electric (Ray Bradbury); 6 the man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred; 8 body-part roll call with such poetic lines as “the nostrils of the nose, and the partition”; A Woman Waits For Thee. To be more explicit, “The poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry, our lusty lurking masculine poems,” shed sunrise out of me. “As Adam early in the morning … Touch me, be not afraid of my body.” (The obscenity charges are hardly surprising!)
According to Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life (1980), Whitman enthused by the onset of Civil War (“Beat! Beat! Drums!”) but as a nurse saw its horrors (“The Wound-Dresser,” many prose pieces about bloody battles). He memorialized the fallen Abraham Lincoln in “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” (O powerful western fallen star! The sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands) and in “O Captain! My Captain” (which was so often reprinted that Whitman despaired—he wondered out loud when would any of his other work be republished). Kosmos (who includes diversity and is Nature/and who is the aptitude of the earth). Passage to India (E. M. Forster).
Prose includes Specimen Days. The Real War Will Never Get Into the Books. Argued that the U.S. and Canada should have a customs union (a Zollverein). Some philosophizing about Carlyle and Hegel, and on the limitations of Darwinism.
The final line of the whole Leaves of Grass is “The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.” That reminds me of “The End,” the final song recorded by the Beatles (ending “and in the end the love you take/is equal to/the love you make”). In a backhanded compliment, John Lennon said the verse “proves that when [Paul McCartney] wants to, he can think.”
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888). Little Women (1869) is historically important for merging the children’s story and the courtship story into realistic fiction. It’s contingent, not at all clear in Part One which sister (Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy) is going to wind up with which guy in Part Two (Laurie, James, Friedrich, ?), if a reader really cared (and many did—that’s why there was a Part Two, and a Little Men). The characters mature and distinguish affection “like a brother/sister” from true romance. I can see how future generations of female writers saw themselves in the development of Jo, blending her headstrong nature with her conscience and drive for service. Laurie should have been told there was no law that required him to marry one or another of the sisters; there must have been other girls available at the time.
Mark Twain (1835-1910). The Justin Kaplan biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966) has telling anecdotes. Twain had money issues his whole life (“my inkwell is not Aladdin’s lamp”) and much of his energy was focused on his generous terms for publishing Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs, his relationship with oil tycoon H.H. Rogers, and his fancy typesetting machine. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was his first big strike. I enjoyed The Awful German Language (he preferred “the pantomime version” of Wagner’s Ring), but have not delved into most other works. The American frontier had closed by 1893 for both Frederick Jackson Turner and Twain (“my California is gone”; Mono Lake was “a dead sea” even by 1869). He was born and died adjacent to sightings of Halley’s Comet.
I hadn’t read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) since childhood, but I see it was partly intended “to remind adults of what they once were themselves.” He describes his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri (the model for the novel’s St. Petersburg) as “a white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning.” The fence-whitewashing episode confirms that “to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain … that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do.” I recall church services with prayers “for the President” and hymns called by hymnal number like “Old One Hundred”; sending ladybugs home with a rhyme; play-acting pirates and soldiers (if not robbers); making secrets among friends or first crushes; and even getting “a mite bewildered” with faltering candle/flashlight (in a cave, or for me, Los Padres National Forest). Absorbing lickings on someone else’s behalf, attending one’s own funeral, identifying the real murderer, and discovering immense treasure were not in my past though. No real-life lessons in here, and even Twain said there was “no plot to the thing.”
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) (1885) is a different creation altogether. Collectively, these two books occupy multiple worlds—reminiscences of life in the 1830s and 1840s, a backward look at the Civil War that tore that life asunder, and a cynical view of later America undergoing what Twain brilliantly labeled the Gilded Age.
Let’s get the big issue out of the way right now. Like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a work I admire even more, Twain’s masterpiece compels us to decide how much authorial irony we will tolerate when the N word and dehumanizing descriptions are thrust upon us from the voices of the characters. The Michael Patrick Hearn annotation states, “To replace [it] with ‘Black’ is anachronistic and untrue to Huck’s upbringing, class and rhetoric.” Maybe so, but if the practical alternative is to see the book banned (or, in the 1955 CBS televised version, the character of Jim omitted!) replacement seems the better option. Then you can tell the reader what word was there instead of “Black” throughout, and let him or her ponder and say hmmmm. See the incendiary 2002 book of my Yale Law School contemporary Randall Kennedy, or any of my favorite Dave Chapelle comedy shows. For me, saying the word authentically isn’t worth it if it means keeping audiences away from the work completely.
Some of my favorite moments: When the boys in the highwaymen’s club pledge their secrecy upon penalty of their relatives’ deaths, Huck acceptably offers the unrelated Miss Watson. Huck is caught impersonating a girl by (i) moving the needle not the thread, (ii) throwing a ball accurately (!), and (iii) closing his knees to catch an object while seated rather than letting it fall onto a dress or apron. The earthy term hawking and sp[itting], recently popularized on TikTok. Emmeline Grangerford’s bathetic Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d, which A. E. Housman confessed to having memorized. The Grangerford-Shepherdson feud continued by combatants clueless what it was about, ending in gunfire after the Juliet Sophie G elopes with the Romeo Henry S. The King’s and Duke’s pastiche of a Shakespearean soliloquy, and their ending a flyer with the enticing R-rating “LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED—there, if that don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansaw!”
What gets the book into the Great American Novel conversation (I personally don’t rate it that highly, compared with the Melville and Fitzgerald contestants) is the development of Huck’s conscience along the riverrun (“it’s lovely to live on a raft”). It begins when he regrets playing a trick on Jim, and climaxes when he contrasts (i) complying with the laws of man and God by “delivering up” the fugitive with (ii) his own growing awareness that Jim is his friend and a man. “You can’t pray a lie—I found that out … all right then, I’ll go to hell.” Contrast his moral decision with the obtuse mindset of Aunt Sally (“Anybody hurt? [no, one Black fatality] Well, it’s lucky, because sometimes people do get hurt”), cited by H.L.A. Hart addressing personhood in The Concept of Law.
The rest of the work is in fact an anti-climax; all ends too easily and too well. Twain never completed a “threequel,” Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians—andit’s just as well, as I understand the draft is unironically disparaging of Native Americans.
I wanted to like James by Percival Everett. I really did. But I grimaced as I read, and concurred with the comment of Evan Grillon that “it’s more interesting, unfortunately, to consider the architecture and philosophy of James, or to compare Huckleberry Finn to James, than it is to actually read James.” Part One especially is an extended play on the tired trope of code-shifting by eloquent underclass characters. In a safe conversation, enslaved persons comment “Will that be an example of proleptic irony or dramatic irony?” and “Labyrinthine and Daedalean.” Please. It’s been done over and over. Think Aristophanes’ feigned fools, think Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover(“Tha’s got the nicest arse of anybody”), think Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles (“CandygramTM fo’ Mistah Mongo”), think Lionel Jefferson talking to Archie Bunker in All in the Family, all of whom observed grammatical conventions in other settings. Parts Two and Three, jolted decades ahead into the Civil War era (?), at least stand on their own and connect Huck to some surprisingly imagined roots. But as I reacted to other second-banana novels (The Penelopiad, The Sword of Achilles, Circe, The Wide Sargasso Sea), they strike me as invasive and, well, appropriative (ooh!) of the original. “Write your own dang story, I say.”
William Dean Howells (1837-1920). The Rise of Silas Lapham is about the rise—and fall—of a materialist who lacks sound values. It is called a realist novel that paves the way for Theodore Dreiser and his ilk. (I dislike labels like “realism,” “naturalism” and especially “modernism.” I reckon I am a card-carrying “anti-labelist.”)
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). Note the question mark—Bierce disappeared while sojourning with Pancho Villa in Mexico. H. L. Mencken said, “There was no more discretion in Bierce than you would find in a runaway locomotive.” “The wickedest man in San Francisco,” it was said of him at a time when that was quite a statement. “My country, ‘tis of thee/Sweet land of felony.” He is wrongly given credit for “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” but probably wished he had said it—and it is still sadly an apt line.
The Devil’s Dictionary is mean-spirited in the main, though there are some zingers (Apologize, v. To lay the foundation for a future offense; Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum—“I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”; Egotist,n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me). An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a science-fiction precursor; I remember seeing the short film in junior high school (early in the tale, we were tipped off that “As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead”—but whoever picked up on that?). Write it Right is Bierce’s surprisingly stuffy guide to proper English usage.
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) features provincial New England charm, dialect, and a seafaring milieu. Mrs. Todd’s boarder hears tales of Captain Littlepage and others. None of this is my cup of tea, and even the praise from Henry James and Ursula K. Le Guin seems a bit faint.
Kate Chopin (1851-1904). The Awakening is a bit like Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler—the story of a woman taking command of her own sentiments. Edna is enmeshed in a loveless marriage, thwarted by men who play by the same rules with none of the consequences. It apparently inspired twentieth-century literary Southerners on the one hand and feminist authors on the other (or on both hands).
O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) (1862-1910). Neat inversions of fate.Martin Gardner commented on The Gift of the Magi’s curious opening mathematics “One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of was in pennies.”(The solution? In 1906 there were three-cent pieces!) In The Ransom of Red Chief, the father offers the kidnappers, “You bring Johnny home and pay me two hundred and fifty dollars in cash, and I agree to take him off your hands.”
Stephen Crane (1871-1900). The Red Badge of Courage is a saga of Henry Fleming’s sin and redemption, albeit self-redemption from his initial cowardice. After his combat heroics, “the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle.” Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) is what it says it is, a realist tale (with distracting dialect spellings) of a woman’s downfall amid the urban squalor of “Rum Alley.” A far cry from Washington Irving’s “Gotham”! I distinctly remember from middle school 1971 both the opening line of The Open Boat, “None of them knew the color of the sky,” and the Winslow Homer painting The Gulf Stream. I had forgotten that the shipwrecked sailors desperately swam ashore in an icy January.
Trumbull Stickney (1874-1908). No one knows this poet, but I love “I hear a river thro’ the valley wander/Whose water runs, the song alone remaining./A rainbow stands and summer passes under.” It is a fragment yet it is entire. I bid sublime farewell to a younger America, “the fresh green breast of the new world.”