ve in Europe; he lived in the present and in the world about
him, his home was America, his era was his own.

If we have no national literature, it is because those who write
spend the better part of their lives abroad; they may not leave
their own firesides, but all their sympathies are elsewhere, all
their inspiration is drawn from other lands and other times.

We have very little art, very little architecture, very little
music of our own for the same reasons. We have any number of
painters, sculptors, composers, but few of them live at home;
their sympathies are elsewhere; they seem to have little or
nothing in common with their surroundings. Now and then a clear,
fresh voice is heard from out of the woods and fields, or over the
city's din, speaking with the convincing eloquence of immediate
knowledge and first-hand observation; but there are so few of
these voices that they do not amount to a chorus, and a national
literature means a chorus.

All this will gradually change until some day the preacher will
return from Jerusalem, the painter from Paris, the poet from
England, the architect from Rome, and the overwhelming problems
presented by the unparalleled development and opportunities of
America will absorb their attention to the exclusion of all else.

The danger of travel, the danger of learning, the danger of
reading, of profound research and extensive observation, lies in
the fact that some age, city, or country, some man or coterie of
men, may gain too firm a hold, may so absorb the attention and
restrict the imagination that the sense of proportion is lost. It
requires a level head to withstand the allurements of the past,
the fascination of the foreign. Nothing disturbed Shakespeare's
equanimity. Neither Stratford nor London bounded his life. On the
wings of his imagination he visited the known earth and penetrated
beyond the blue skies, he made the universe his home; and yet he
was essentially and to the last an Englishman.

When we stopped before "Orchard House" it was desolate and
forsaken, and the entrance to the "Hillside Chapel," where the
"Concord School of Philosophy and Literature" had its home for
nine years, was boarded up.

Parts of the house had been built more than a century and a half
when Mrs. Alcott bought it in 1857. In her journal for July, 1858,
the author of "Little Women" records, "Went into the new house and
began to settle. Father is happy; mother glad to be at rest; Anna