sm and that, now vanished as a
frontier, foreshadows the vanishment of democracy and capitalism.

In _Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and a Myth_ (Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950) Henry Nash Smith plows
deep. But the tools of this humanistic historian are of delicate finish
rather than of horsepower. To him, thinking is a joyful process and
lucidity out of complexity is natural. He compasses Parrington's _Main
Currents in American Thought_ and Beadle's Dime Novels along with
agriculture and manufacturing. Excepting the powerful books by Walter
Prescott Webb, not since Frederick Jackson Turner, in 1893, presented
his famous thesis on "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History" has such a revealing evaluation of frontier movements appeared
As a matter of fact, Henry Nash Smith leaves Turner's ideas on the
dependence of democracy upon farmers without more than one leg to stand
upon. Not being a King Canute, he does not take sides for or against
social evolution. With the clearest eyes imaginable, he looks into it.
Turner's _The Frontier in American History_ (1920) has been a fertile
begetter of interpretations of history.

Instead of being the usual kind of jokesmith book or concatenation
of tall tales, _Folk Laughter on the American Frontier_ by Mody C.
Boatright (Macmillan, New York, 1949) goes into the human and social
significances of humor. Of boastings, anecdotal exaggerations,
hide-and-hair metaphors, stump and pulpit parables, tenderfoot baitings,
and the like there is plenty, but thought plays upon them and arranges
them into patterns of social history.

Mary Austin (1868-1934) is an interpreter of nature, which for her
includes naturally placed human beings as much as naturally placed
antelopes and cacti. She wrote _The American Rhythm_ on the theory that
authentic poetry expresses the rhythms of that patch of earth to which
the poet is rooted. Rhythm is experience passed into the subconscious
and is "distinct from our intellectual perception of it." Before they
can make true poetry, English-speaking Americans will be in accord
with "the run of wind in tall grass" as were the Pueblo Indians when
Europeans discovered them. But Mary Austin's primary importance is not
as a theorist. Her spiritual depth is greater than her intellectual. She
is a translator of nature through concrete observations. She interprets
through character sketches, folk tales, novels. "Anybody can