Emerson is continually urging us to give heed to this grand voice of hills
and streams, and to mould ourselves upon its suggestions. The difficulty
and the anomaly are that we are not native; that England is our mother,
quite as much as Monadnoc; that we are heirs of memories and traditions
reaching far beyond the times and the confines of the Republic. We cannot
assume the splendid childlikeness of the great primitive races, and
exhibit the hairy strength and unconscious genius that the poet longs to
find in us. He remarks somewhere that the culminating period of good in
nature and the world is in just that moment of transition, when the
swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency
or acidity is got out by ethics and humanity.

It was at such a period that Greece attained her apogee; but our
experience, it seems to me, must needs be different. Our story is not of
birth, but of regeneration, a far more subtle and less obvious
transaction. The Homeric California of which Bret Harte is the reporter
does not seem to me in the closest sense American. It is a comparatively
superficial matter--this savage freedom and raw poetry; it belongs to all
pioneering life, where every man must stand for himself, and Judge Lynch
strings up the defaulter to the nearest tree. But we are only incidentally
pioneers in this sense; and the characteristics thus impressed upon us
will leave no traces in the completed American. "A sturdy lad from New
Hampshire or Vermont," says Emerson, "who in turn tries all the
professions--who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches,
edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in
successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet--is worth a
hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no
shame in not studying a 'profession,' for he does not postpone his life,
but lives already." That is stirringly said: but, as a matter of fact,