the modesty to blush for themselves. We
are ashamed for Guinevere and Lancelot, and are proud of Enid and
Elaine and Sir Galahad and King Arthur; and in them, and in others,
have been helped to see the heroic beauty of simple virtue. This is an
incalculable gain for soul. When we have learned that profligates,
whatever their spasms of flashy achievements, are poor company, and
that the pure are evermore good company, and goodness is a quest
worthier than the quest for the golden grail, we have risen to nobility
of soul which can never become out of date.

Noah was not more clearly a preacher of righteousness in his day than
Tennyson in his, of whom say, as highest encomium we know to pronounce,
"He made goodness beautiful to our eyes and desirable to our hearts;
and, beyond this, made it easier for us to be good."

Over all this poet wrote, he might have looked straight in God's eye,
and prayed, as King Arthur:

"And that which I have done
May he within himself make pure!"

And we chant, sending our muse after him,--

"Nor was there moaning of the bar
When he set out to sea."

To him saying, "We love him yet, and shall while life endures,"
borrowing Whittier's God-speed to the dead Bayard Taylor:

"Let the home-voices greet him in the far,
Strange land that holds him; let the messages
Of love pursue him o'er the chartless seas
And unmapped vastness of his unknown star!
Love's language, heard above the loud discourse,
Of perishable fame, in every sphere
Itself interprets; and its utterance here,
Somewhere in God's unfolding universe,
Shall reach our traveler, softening the surprise
Of his rapt gaze on unfamiliar skies!"

VIII

The American Historians

The average American traveler is better acquainted with foreign lands
than with his own country. Nor is he unique in this regard. I have
known persons who lived a lifetime within a dozen squares of
Westminster Abbey, and were never inside of that historic cathedral, as
I have known persons to live forty years not fifty miles distant from
Niagara, and never to have heard the organ speech of that great
cataract. This is a common flaw in intellect. We tend to
underestimate the near, and exaggerate the remote. Another application
of the same frailty is noticeable in literature. Homegrown literature
is, with not a few, depreciated. According to their logic, good things
can not come out of Nazareth, and imported pr