ention held in Massachusetts, there were no county banners
displayed, for the first time in half a century. Many a city-dweller
to-day cannot tell in what county he is living unless he has happened
to make a transfer of real estate. State lines themselves are fading
away. The federal idea has triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the
fellow citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were all the more proud of
him because the poet could say of him, in writing an admiring and
mournful epitaph:--

"Beyond Virginia's border line
His patriotism perished."

The great collections of Civil War verse, which are lying almost
unread in the libraries, are store-houses of this ancient state pride
and jealousy, which was absorbed so fatally into the larger sectional
antagonism. "Maryland, my Maryland" gave place to "Dixie," just as
Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten when marching men
began to sing "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the
Republic." The literature of sectionalism still lingers in its more
lovable aspect in the verse and fiction which still celebrates the
fairer side of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals of
chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women and gallant men. Our
literature needs to cultivate this provincial affection for the past,
as an offset to the barren uniformity which the federal scheme allows.
But the ultimate imaginative victory, like the actual political victory
of the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling of Nationalism. It is
foreshadowed in that passionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so
much and, like all true passion, anticipates so much:--

"O Beautiful! my Country!"

The literary record of American idealism thus illustrates how deeply
the conception of Nationalism has affected the imagination of our
countrymen. The literary record of the American conception of liberty
runs further back. Some historians have allowed themselves to think
that the American notion of liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort
of futile echo of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me Death";
and not only declamatory, but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They
grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for agitators against the
Stamp Act, and for pamphleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have
been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways in the Revolutionary War;
but they believe it likewise to be a torch which gleams with the fire
caught from Fran