rian peasant, if you would learn how the
twelfth and nineteenth centuries live together in the current year. The
one is self-reliant, helpful, and versatile, not freighted with any
old-world rubbish; while the other is abject, and blindly reverent, and
full of the old mythic imagination that is in strong contrast with the
keen common-sense of the Protestant, who dispels all twilight fantasies
with a laugh of utter incredulity. The one sees projected on the outer
world his own imaginings, now fair, now gloomy; while the other sees in
the world, land to be cut up into corner-lots for speculation, and
water for sawmills and cotton-mills, and to float clipper-ships and
steamers. The one is this-worldly; the other is other-worldly. The one
is armed and equipped at all points to deal with the Actual, to subdue
it and make the most of it; he aims for success and wealth, for
elegance, plenty, and comfort in his home;--while the other is
negligent, a frequenter of shrines, in all things too superstitious,
overlooking and slighting mere physical comfort, and content with
misery and dirt. The Romish peasant lives begirt by supernatural
beings, who demand a large share of his time and thoughts for their
service; while the thrifty Protestant artisan or agriculturist is a
practical naturalist, keeping his eye fixed on the main chance.
Brownson would have us believe that he is morally and spiritually the
inferior of the former. For this light of common day, which now shines
upon the world, the multiplication-table, and reading and writing, are
far better than amulet, rosary, and crucifix.

After all, this light of common day, which the bards and saints so much
condemn and disdain, when subjected to the microscopic and telescopic
ken of modern science, opens as large a field for wonder and for the
imagination to revel in as did the old marvels, fables, and fictions of
the Past. The True is beginning to be found as strange, nay, stranger
than the purely Imaginative and Mythic. The Beautiful and the Good will
yet be found to be as consistent with the strictly True and Actual,
with the plain Matter-of-Fact as it is called, as they have been, in
the heroic ages of human-achievement and endurance, with the glorious
cheats and delusions that nerved man to high emprise. The modern
scientific discoverer and inventor oftentimes finds himself engaged in
quests as strange as that of the Holy Grail of Round-Table fiction. To
the Past, with its myt