ds of minds in a
certain degree of culture, although but one man could have written it.
The writing member of a family is often the one who acquires notoriety
and a bank account, but he is likely to have candid friends who admit,
though not always in his presence, that, aside from this one
professional gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emotionally
or spiritually superior to his brothers and sisters. Waldo Emerson
thought himself the intellectual inferior of his brother Charles; and
good observers loved to maintain that John Holmes was wittier than
Oliver Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer than Daniel.

Applied to the literary history of a race, this principle is
suggestive. We must be slow to affirm that, because certain ideas and
feelings did not attain, in this or that age or place, to purely
literary expression, they were therefore not in existence. The men and
women of the colonial period in our own country, for instance, have
been pretty uniformly declared to have been deficient in the sense of
beauty. What is the evidence? It is mostly negative. They produced no
poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, or music worthy of the name. They
were predominantly Puritan, and the whole world has been informed that
English Puritanism was hostile to Art. They were preoccupied with
material and moral concerns. Even if they had remained in England,
Professor Trent affirms, these contemporaries of Milton and Bunyan
would have produced no art or literature. Now it is quite true that for
nearly two hundred years after the date of the first settlement of the
American colonists, opportunities for cultivating the arts did not
exist. But that the sense of beauty was wholly atrophied, I, for one,
do not believe. The passionate eagerness with which the forefathers
absorbed the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their one
book, the Bible; the unwearied curiosity and care with which those
farmers and fishermen and woodsmen read the signs of the sky; their awe
of the dark wilderness and their familiar traffic with the great deep;
the silences of lonely places; the opulence of primeval meadows by the
clear streams; the English flowers that were made to bloom again in
farmhouse windows and along garden walks; the inner visions, more
lovely still, of duty and of moral law; the spirit of sacrifice; the
daily walk with God, whether by green pastures of the spirit or through
ways that were dark and terrible;--is