centres in the river which
rushes between them from the Alps to the sea. This is a democratic note,
but there is another quite as distinct and characteristic--the note of
buoyant cheerfulness, faith in God and man.

There is a ringing tone in the literature of New England which is not
only a protest against any form of oppression, but a challenge to fate.
That courage came from faith in the divine order of life. And that
buoyant courage and cheerfulness were possible because these writers
kept life and art in harmony. There was no schism between ideal and
action in them. They not only followed the vision in spirit; they lived
in the light of it. They illustrated that unity of life without which
there is no God. They kept in the way of growth and truth and
inspiration because they lived wisely. We do not half value their
splendid sanity. A manly and noble moral health was theirs. They rang
true to every moral appeal. They were not only men of letters, but they
were also gentlemen, and they have associated literature in the thought
of the country with dignity, culture and beauty of life--Emerson's
unworldliness, Lowell's loyalty to truth, and Curtis's splendid
rectitude, as enduring as the granite, are of lasting value to the
higher life of the nation.

Their courage and buoyancy were of higher value than we yet understand.
Faith is absolutely essential in a great democratic society. When we
cease to believe in God we cease to believe in man, and when our faith
in man goes, democracy becomes a vast, irrational engine of tyranny and
corruption. In the last analysis democracy rests in the belief that
there is something of the divine in every man, and that through every
life there shines a glimpse of the eternal order. For Government rests,
not in the will of the majority, but on the will of God; and democracy
is but a vaster surface upon which to discover the play of that will. It
follows from these characteristics that the real significance of the New
England writers lies not in what they did, but in what they
unconsciously predicted. Clear and ringing as are the notes they struck,
these notes are prelusive; they suggest the great _motifs_, but they do
not completely unfold them; they could not, for the time was not yet
ripe; they announced the principle of individuality, and they sang the
great idea of nationality; but the depth and richness of national life
was not theirs to express. That vast life rises more and more