"The West is preparing
to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the
Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine, having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what
the valleys of the Amazon, the Platte, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the
Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty
has become a fiction of the past,-as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,-the
poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology....".