he
Spanish-American War. It would be nearer the truth to say that so far
as the things of the mind and the spirit are concerned, there has never
been any absolute isolation. The Middle West, from the days of Jackson
to Lincoln, that raw West described by Dickens and Mrs. Trollope, comes
nearer isolation than any other place or time. The period of the most
eloquent assertions of American independence in artistic and literary
matters was the epoch of New England Transcendentalism, which was
itself singularly cosmopolitan in its literary appetites. The letters
and journals of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau show the strong European
meat on which these men fed, just before their robust declarations of
our self-sufficiency. But there is no real self-sufficiency, and
Emerson and Whitman themselves, in other moods, have written most
suggestive passages upon our European inheritances and affiliations.

The fortunes of the early New England colonies, in fact, were followed
by Protestant Europe with the keen solicitude and affection of kinsmen.
Oliver Cromwell signs his letter to John Cotton in 1651, "Your
affectionate friend to serve you." The settlements were regarded as
outposts of European ideas. Their Calvinism, so cheaply derided and so
superficially understood, even to-day, was the intellectual platform of
that portion of Europe which was mentally and morally awake to the vast
issues involved in individual responsibility and self-government.
Contemporary European democracy is hardly yet aware that Calvin's
_Institutes_ is one of its great charters. Continental Protestantism of
the seventeenth century, like the militant Republicanism of the English
Commonwealth, thus perused with fraternal interest the letters from
Massachusetts Bay. And if Europe watched America in those days, it was
no less true that America was watching Europe. Towards the end of the
century, Cotton Mather, "prostrate in the dust" before the Lord, as
his newly published _Diary_ tells us, is wrestling "on the behalf of
whole nations." He receives a "strong Persuasion that very overturning
Dispensations of Heaven will quickly befal the French Empire"; he
"lifts up his Cries for a mighty and speedy Revolution" there. "I
spread before the Lord the Condition of His Church abroad ...
especially in Great Britain and in France. And I prayed that the poor
Vaudois may not be ruined by the Peace now made between France and
Savoy. I prayed likewise for further Mortifi