igh social morality which on the whole it preserved
took another colour; people remained honest and helpful out of good
sense and good will rather than out of scrupulous adherence to any
fixed principles. They retained their instinct for order, and often
created order with surprising quickness; but the sanctity of law, to
be obeyed for its own sake, began to escape them; it seemed too
unpractical a notion, and not quite serious. In fact, the second and
native-born American mentality began to take shape. The sense of sin
totally evaporated. Nature, in the words of Emerson, was all beauty
and commodity; and while operating on it laboriously, and drawing
quick returns, the American began to drink in inspiration from it
aesthetically. At the same time, in so broad a continent, he had
elbow-room. His neighbours helped more than they hindered him; he
wished their number to increase. Good will became the great American
virtue; and a passion arose for counting heads, and square miles, and
cubic feet, and minutes saved--as if there had been anything to save
them for. How strange to the American now that saying of Jonathan
Edwards, that men are naturally God's enemies! Yet that is an axiom to
any intelligent Calvinist, though the words he uses may be different.
If you told the modern American that he is totally depraved, he would
think you were joking, as he himself usually is. He is convinced that
he always has been, and always will be, victorious and blameless.

Calvinism thus lost its basis in American life. Some emotional
natures, indeed, reverted in their religious revivals or private
searchings of heart to the sources of the tradition; for any of the
radical points of view in philosophy may cease to be prevalent, but
none can cease to be possible. Other natures, more sensitive to the
moral and literary influences of the world, preferred to abandon
parts of their philosophy, hoping thus to reduce the distance which
should separate the remainder from real life.

Meantime, if anybody arose with a special sensibility or a technical
genius, he was in great straits; not being fed sufficiently by the
world, he was driven in upon his own resources. The three American
writers whose personal endowment was perhaps the finest--Poe,
Hawthorne, and Emerson--had all a certain starved and abstract
quality. They could not retail the genteel tradition; they were too
keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life offered
them