, no "pouring of the waters of concession into
the bottomless buckets of expediency."

Thus do our poets declare their inheritance. But they do not stop there.
To the indomitable power of the Puritan conscience they have added a
wealth of imaginative sympathy. They have made sweetness to be the issue
of strength, and beauty to be the halo of power. They have seen the
vision of the rainbow round the throne. They have touched with divine
light the prosaic story of New England, and found the picturesque in
what seemed commonplace. They have seen the great in the little, and
ennobled the humbler ways of existence with spiritual insight. They have
set to music the homely service and simple enjoyments of common life.
They have touched the chords that speak to the universal heart. The very
provincialism of our poets endears them to us. Their work, as some
foreign critic said, has been done in a corner. We do not deny it. But,
verily we believe, that New England is the corner lot of our national
estate. Our poets have preserved for us in ballads our homespun legends.
They have imaged in verse the beauty of New England's hills and waters.
As we read there comes the whiff of fragrance which transports us to the
hillside pasture where the sweet fern and sorrel grow, or the salt
breeze of the sea blows again on our cheeks, or the rippling Merrimac
sings in our ears, or the heights of Katahdin or Wachusett, lift our
eyes upward. Finally, our poets, in their characters, disprove the
reproach that a democracy can produce only average men. As they wrote,
they were.

The harp of New England is silent. The master hands sweep the chords no
more. But shall we dare to think that the coming generation will have no
songs and no singers? Shall we build the sepulchre of poetry? Shall we
express ourselves only in histories and criticisms? Shall man no longer
behold God and nature face to face? "Things are in the saddle to-day,"
said Emerson; and indeed it may well depress us to see our greatness as
a nation measured by the number of bushels of wheat raised, or the
number of hogs packed. "The value of a country," said Lowell, "is
weighed in scales more delicate than the balance of trade. On a map of
the world you may cover Judea with your thumb, Athens with a finger tip,
and neither of them figures in the prices current, yet they still live
in the thought and action of every civilized man. Material success is
good, but only as the necessary prel