Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[256] great inventions which make the chronicle of the vast interior! An Easterner traveling in the West may well be amazed, not at any ostentation of vanity on the part of Western hosts, but at their wonderful humility over an achievement so vast as the material conquest of a continent. How easily all else must seem to them secondary; so that it may look like a trivial matter, as the Western editor said, to “make culture hum.” But when we turn our eyes backward, we see that in all nations the laurels of literature have endured beyond these external displays of power. They outlive cities, state-houses and statesmen. One may quote those fine lines of the once famous poem, Festus:--

Homer is gone, and where is Troy and where
The rival cities seven? His song outlasts
Town, tower and god, all that then was, save Heaven.

It may be that Mr. Norris's book will live when the tremendous operations of the wheat pit are forgotten; or if not that book, some other. Life is more important than art, but art is its noblest record.