ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an extract from the Preface, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” to November Boughs, Philadelphia, 1888. Even Shakespeare, who so suffuses current letters and art (which indeed have in most degrees grown out of him,) belongs essentially to the buried past. Only he holds the proud distinction for certain important phases of that past, of being the loftiest of the singers life has yet given voice to. Without stopping to qualify the averment, the Old World has had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalisms, conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional characters and affairs, which have been great. The New World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality, which shall be greater.
