the waters of the
river of life! And it is into these elements that his genius, with its
peculiar vital simplicity and intensity, strikes root. Historic reality,
the great _facts_ of his time, are the soil in which he grows, as they
are with all natures of depth and energy. "We did not wish," said
Goethe, "to learn, but to live."

Quakerism and America--America ideally true to herself--quickly became,
in his mind, one and the same. Quakerism means _divine democracy_.
George Fox was the first forerunner, the John Baptist, of the new
time,--leather-aproned in the British wilderness. Seeing the whole world
dissolving into individualism, he did not try to tie it together, after
the fashion of great old Hooker, with new cords of ecclesiasticism; but
he did this,--he affirmed a Mount Sinai in the heart of the individual,
and gave to the word _person_ an INFINITE depth. To sound that
word thus was his function in history. No wonder that England trembled
with terror, and then blazed with rage. No wonder that many an ardent
James Naylor was crazed with the new wine.

Puritanism meant the same thing at bottom; but, accepting the more legal
and learned interpretations of Calvin, it was, to a great degree,
involved in the past, and also turned its eye more to political
mechanisms. For this very reason it kept up more of fellowship with the
broad world, and had the benefit of this in a larger measure of social
fructification. Whatever is separated dies. Quakerism uttered a word so
profound that the utterance made it insular; and, left to itself, it
began to be lost in itself. Nevertheless, Quakerism and Puritanism are
the two richest historic soils of modern time.

Our young poet got at the heart of the matter. He learned to utter the
word _Man_ so believingly that it sounded down into depths of the divine
and infinite. He learned to say, with Novalis, "He touches heaven who
touches a human body." And when he uttered this word, "Man," in full,
_social_ breadth, lo! it changed, and became AMERICA.

There begins the genesis of the conscious poet. All the depths of his
heart rang with the resonance of these imaginations,--Man, America;
meaning divine depth of manhood, divine spontaneity and rectitude of
social relationship.

But what! what is this? Just as he would raise his voice to chant the
new destinies of man, a harsh, heartless, human bark, and therewith a
low, despairing stifle of sobbing, came to his ear! It is the bark of