let him be, even by promise, a seer of those primary truths in which
the interests of all are comprehended and made identical, and the
virtue of his vision will become the assurance of his welfare.
Doubtless, sad men will say that our own eyes are clouded with some
glittering dust of optimism, when we declare that this Man for the
Continent is the very one whose advent we celebrate. This might,
indeed, seem a fatuitously dulcet song to sing just now, when a din of
defection and recreancy is loud through all the land,--now, when we
have immediately in view, and on the largest scale, an open patronage
of infamous wrong-doing, so brazen-fronted and blush-proof that only
the spectacle itself makes its credibility;--the prior possibility of
it we should one and all hasten, for the honor of human nature, to
deny. Yet in the midst of all this are visible the victorious
influences that mould the imported Teuton to the spiritual form which
his appointed tasks imply. These we now hasten to indicate.

And first, every breath of American air helps to make him the American
Man. The atmosphere of America was early noted as a wonder-worker. Ten
years subsequent to the landing at Plymouth, the Rev. Francis
Higginson, an acute observer, wrote to the mother country,--"A sup of
New England air is better than a whole flagon of old English ale." Jean
Paul says that the roots of humankind are the lungs, and that, being
rooted in air,--we are properly children of the aether. Truly, children
of the aether,--and so, children of fire. For the oxygen, upon which
the lungs chiefly feed, is _the_ fiery principle in Nature,--all that
we denominate fire and flame being but the manifestation of its action.
We are severe upon fire-eaters, Southern and other; yet here are we,
cool Northerns, quaffing this very principle and essence of fire in
large lung-draughts every moment, each of us carrying a perpetual
furnace in his bosom. Now it is doubtless true that we inhale more