ABSTRACT
This chapter inquires into some of literature's present and prospective characteristics. The literature of the West is now, and will continue to be, ultra-republican. The literature of a young and a free people, will of course be declamatory, and such, so far as it is yet developed, is the character of own. The early history, biography, and scenery of the Valley of the Mississippi, will confer on literature a variety of important benefits. A literature, animated with this patriotism, is a national blessing, and such must be the literature of the West. That of all parts of the Union must be richly endowed with this spirit; but a double portion will be the lot of the interior, because the foreign influences, which dilute and vitiate this virtue in the extremities, cannot reach the heart of the continent, where all that lives and moves is American.
