By the co-working of these two grand tendencies we obtain at once the
largest speculative breadth and the closest practical and personal
interest. What sweeter promise could any one ask than that of this rare
and admirable combination? Thought and action have been more than
sufficiently separated. The philosopher has discoursed to a few, and in
the dialect of the few, in Academic shades; sanctity has hidden itself
away, lost in the joy of its secret contemplations; the great world has
rolled by, unhearing, unheeding,--like London roaring with cataract
thunder around St. Paul's, while within the choral service is performed
to an audience of one. Thinking and doing have hardly recognized each
other. Now we are not of those vague, enthusiastic persons who fancy
that all truths are for all ears,--that the highest spiritual fact can
be communicated, where there is no spiritual apprehension to lay hold
upon it. _He that hath ears_, let him hear. Nor would we attempt to
confuse the functions of sayer and doer. But let there be a sympathy
and understanding between them, that, when achieved, will mark an epoch
in the world's history. Nowhere, at least in modern times, have thought
and action approached so nearly and intimately as in America; nowhere
is speculative intellect so colored with the hues of practical interest
without limiting its own flight; nowhere are labor and executive power
so receptive of pure intellectual suggestion. The union of what is
deepest and most recondite in thought with clear-sighted sagacity has
been well hit by Lowell in his description of the typical American
scholar,--

"Sits in a mystery calm and intense,
And looks round about him with sharp common-sense."

That is, the New Man has two things that seldom make each other's
acquaintance,--Sight and Insight. Accordingly, our subtilest thinker,
whom the scholarly Mr. Vaughan classes with the mystics and accuses of
going beyond the legitimate range even of mystics, has written such an
estimate of the most practical nation in the world as has never been
written of that or any other before. The American knows what is about
him, has tact, sagacity, conversance with surfaces and circumstances,
is the shrewdest guesser in the world; and seeing him on this side
alone, one might say,--This is the man of to-day, a quick worker, good
to sail ships, bore mountains, buy and sell, but belonging to the
surface, knowing only that. The medal turns, and lo! he