Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[172] the wonders of them all into ‘Omar Khayyam,’ who offers no religion whatever, and makes denial more eloquent than faith? Who had then dreamed of the Shakespearian literature, the Dantean literature, the Goethean literature; even the literature of Petrarch, as catalogued by Prof. Willard Fiske, to the extent of nearly a thousand entries? Who had looked forward to vast American historical works like Hubert Bancroft's fifty ample volumes on the Pacific Coast, or Winsor's ‘Narrative and Critical History of America’? Who had imagined the vast spread of magazine literature and of newspaper literature, threatening, as Mr. Holt the publisher predicts, to swamp all study of books beneath a vast deluge of serials and periodicals, to be traversed hereafter only with the aid of literary rafts, charts, and compasses? And then, when all this is enumerated, there is science, claiming itself to monopolize the intellectual world and sometimes intimating doubts whether the function of literature itself be not at an end.

In the very college where the peaceful Popkin once taught, there are now twenty-one distinct