ce that was manly, tender, and clean. The man
among these writers about whose exact rank, neither low nor very high
among poets, there can be least dispute was Longfellow. He might seem
from his favourite subjects to be hardly American; it was his
deliberately chosen task to bring to the new country some savour of
things gentle and mellow caught from the literature of Europe. But, in
the first place, no writer could in the detail of his work have been more
racy of that New England countryside which lay round his home; and, in
the second place, no writer could have spoken more unerringly to the ear
of the whole wide America of which his home was a little part. It seems
strange to couple the name of this mild and scholarly man with the
thought of that crude Western world to which we must in a moment pass.
But the connection is real and vital. It is well shown in the
appreciation written of him and his fellows by the American writer who
most violently contrasts with him, Walt Whitman.

A student of American history may feel something like the experience
which is common among travellers in America. When they come home they
cannot tell their friends what really interested them. Ugly things and
very dull things are prominent in their story, as in the tales of
American humorists. The general impression they convey is of something
tiresomely extensive, distractingly miscellaneous, and yet insufferably
monotonous. But that is not what they mean. They had better not seek to
express themselves by too definite instances. They will be understood
and believed when they say that to them America, with its vast spaces
from ocean to ocean, does present itself as one country, not less worthy
than any other of the love which it has actually inspired; a country
which is the home of distinctive types of manhood and womanhood, bringing
their own addition to the varying forms in which kindness and courage and
truth make themselves admirable to mankind. The soul of a single people
seems to be somewhere present in that great mass, no less than in some
tiny city State of antiquity. Only it has to struggle, submerged
evermore by a flood of newcomers, and defeated evermore by difficulties
quite unlike those of other lands; and it struggles seemingly with
undaunted and with rational hope.

Americans are fond of discussing Americanism. Very often they select as
a pattern of it Abraham Lincoln, the man who kept the North together but
ha