Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[25] least, to select our own teachers. At this moment we go to France for our art and to Germany for our science as completely as if there were no such nation as England in the world. In literature the tie is far closer with what used to be called the mother country, and this because of the identity of language. All retrospective English literature—that is, all literature more than a century or two old—is common to the two countries. All contemporary literature cannot yet be judged, because it is contemporary. The time may come when not a line of current English poetry may remain except the four quatrains hung up in St. Margaret's Church and when the Matthew Arnold of Macaulay's imaginary New Zealand may find with surprise that Whittier and Lowell produced something more worthy of that accidental immortality than Browning or Tennyson. The time may come when a careful study of even the despised American newspapers may reveal them to have been in one respect nearer to a high civilization than any of their European compeers; since the leading American literary journals criticise their own contributors