tive, and daring
youth. The incapables came later. It is, I think, safe to assert that
the colonists of English stock, even as late as 1790,--when more than
ninety per cent of the population of America had in their veins the
blood of the British Isles,--were more responsive to romantic impulses
than their English cousins. For that matter, an Irishman or a Welshman
is more romantic than an Englishman to-day.

From the very beginning of the American settlements, likewise, there
were evidences of the weaker, the over-excitable side of the romantic
temper. There were volatile men like Morton of Merrymount; there were
queer women like Anne Hutchinson, admirable woman as she was; among the
wives of the colonists there were plenty of Emily Dickinsons in the
germ. Among the men, there were schemes that came to nothing. There
were prototypes of Colonel Sellers; a temperamental tendency toward
that recklessness and extravagance which later historical conditions
stimulated and confirmed. The more completely one studies the history
of our forefathers on American soil, the more deeply does one become
conscious of the prevailing atmosphere of emotionalism.

Furthermore, as one examines the historic conditions under which the
spirit of American romance has been preserved and heightened from time
to time, one becomes aware that although ours is rather a romance of
wonder than of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found. The
first fervors of the romance of discovery were childlike in their
eagerness. Hakluyt's _Voyages_, John Smith's _True Relation of
Virginia_, Thomas Morton's _New England's Canaan_, all appeal to the
sense of the marvellous.

Listen to Morton's description of Cape Ann. I can never read it without
thinking of Botticelli's picture of Spring, so naively does this
picturesque rascal suffuse his landscape with the feeling for beauty:--

"In the Moneth of June, Anno Salutis 1622, it was my chaunce
to arrive in the parts of New England with 30. Servants, and
provision of all sorts fit for a plantation: and whiles our
howses were building, I did indeavour to take a survey of
the Country: The more I looked, the more I liked it. And
when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the
place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that
in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd, for so many
goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillucks,
de