of American life, so various are the types in
regions widely separated from each other, such different points of view
are had even in conventionalities, and conscience operates so variously
on moral problems in one community and another. It is as impossible for
one section to impose upon another its rules of taste and propriety
in conduct--and taste is often as strong to determine conduct as
principle--as it is to make its literature acceptable to the other. If
in the land of the sun and the jasmine and the alligator and the fig,
the literature of New England seems passionless and timid in face of the
ruling emotions of life, ought we not to thank Heaven for the diversity
of temperament as well as of climate which will in the long-run save us
from that sameness into which we are supposed to be drifting?

When I think of this vast country with any attention to local
developments I am more impressed with the unlikenesses than with the
resemblances. And besides this, if one had the ability to draw to the
life a single individual in the most homogeneous community, the product
would be sufficiently startling. We cannot flatter ourselves, therefore,
that under equal laws and opportunities we have rubbed out the
saliencies of human nature. At a distance the mass of the Russian people
seem as monotonous as their steppes and their commune villages, but the
Russian novelists find characters in this mass perfectly individualized,
and, indeed, give us the impression that all Russians are irregular
polygons. Perhaps if our novelists looked at individuals as intently,
they might give the world the impression that social life here is as
unpleasant as it appears in the novels to be in Russia.

This is partly the substance of what was said one winter evening before
the wood fire in the library of a house in Brandon, one of the lesser
New England cities. Like hundreds of residences of its kind, it stood
in the suburbs, amid forest-trees, commanding a view of city spires
and towers on the one hand, and on the other of a broken country of
clustering trees and cottages, rising towards a range of hills which
showed purple and warm against the pale straw-color of the winter
sunsets. The charm of the situation was that the house was one of many
comfortable dwellings, each isolated, and yet near enough together to
form a neighborhood; that is to say, a body of neighbors who respected
each other's privacy, and yet flowed together, on occasion,