i, you will see that I passed
into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that
conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification
of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious
natural man.

Where now is _our_ Tolstoi, I said, to bring the truth of all this home
to our American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away
from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched
culture--as it calls itself--is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and
culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a
Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the
ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning
of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some
one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of
Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?

And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and
with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight
into life. In God's eyes the differences of social position, of
intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men
exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so
fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to
vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are,
a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar
difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of
fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage,
patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole
business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of
diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues
may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is
everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in
particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and
decoration of the surface-show.

Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as levelled down,--levelled up
in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness
and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to
be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps
us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no
other purpose than to