e upon the dusty floor of
his study, agonizing now for himself and now for the countries of
Europe; we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his solitary ecstasies in
the Northampton and the Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin
preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of getting on in the world.
Down to the very verge of the Revolution the American pioneer spirit
was forever urging the individual to fight for his own hand. Each boy
on the old farms had his own chores to do; each head of a family had to
plan for himself. The most tragic failure of the individual in those
days was the poverty or illness which compelled him to "go on the
town." To be one of the town poor indicated that the individualistic
battle had been fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, apparently, that
a time for old-age pensions and honorable retiring funds was coming.
The feeling against any form of community assistance was like the
bitter hatred of the workhouse among English laborers of the
eighteen-forties.

The stress upon purely personal qualities gave picturesqueness, color,
and vigor to the early life of the United States. Take the persons whom
Parkman describes in his _Oregon Trail_. They have the perfect
clearness of outline of the portraits by Walter Scott and the great
Romantic school of novelists who loved to paint pictures of interesting
individual men. There is the same stress upon individualistic
portraiture in Irving's _Astoria_; in the humorous journals of early
travellers in the Southern States. It is the secret of the curiosity
with which we observe the gamblers and miners and stage-drivers
described by Bret Harte. In the rural communities of to-day, in the
older portions of the country, and in the remoter settlements of the
West and Southwest, the individual man has a sort of picturesque, and,
as it were, artistic value, which the life of cities does not allow.
The gospel of self-reliance and of solitude is not preached more
effectively by the philosophers of Concord than it is by the
backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of Fenimore Cooper.
Individualism as a doctrine of perfection for the private person and
individualism as a literary creed have thus gone hand in hand. "Produce
great persons, the rest follows," cried Walt Whitman. He was thinking
at the moment about American society and politics. But he believed that
the same law held good in poetry. Once get your great man and let him
abandon himself to poetry and the g