our Thinking, we might say, it is the mere upper surface that we shape into articulate thoughts; — underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse, lies the region of meditation; here, in its quiet mysterious depth, dwells what vital force is in us; here, if ought is to be created and not merely manufactured and communicated, must the work go on. Manufacture is intelligible, but trivial; Creation is great, and cannot be understood."

This vital force lying in its quiet mysterious depths, latent but to be quickened into life by the spark of genius, remained inarticulate. "Why did poetry appear so brightly after the battle of Thermopylæ and Salamis, and quite turn away her face and wings from those of Lexington and Bunker's Hill ?" Carlyle asks, and inadequately answers, “The Greeks were a poetical people, the Americans are not; that is to say, it appeared because it did appear!"" It would have been more scientific and more in consonance with the truth of race development had Carlyle explained that the Greek, living under soft skies and in the midst of color, which was a background to his domestic life, in whom the sense of the æsthetic had been highly cultivated, was stimulated to write poetry; he felt the imperious demand of his nature, and knew that he could command his audience; while the American, pioneering into the unbroken wilderness, wresting from the

1 Carlyle: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. xiv, p. 347.
2 Carlyle: op. cit., p. 255.

soil his precarious existence, awed by the immensity and savagery of creation, felt his own insignificance. And all wares, even intellectual wares, are produced in the hope of finding a market. After Thermopylæ and Salamis there was an audience and a market for poetry and there was a profit or money in producing it; but those embattled farmers who were called from the plow to the battlefield, and from the battlefield returned to the plow, whose shot fired at Lexington was heard round the world, had no time to write or think poetry. There were sterner things to do, and they were done. Had these people, as Campbell says of the Dutch, also produced a Homer, a Dante, or a Shakespeare, they would have been a miracle and not a growth; and the American people, we cannot too often repeat, are not a miracle but a natural growth.

It is a well-established fact that the more primitive a people the higher the birth rate, and New England demonstrated the truth of this law. Men and women married early and bred fast. Of Mrs. Sarah Thayer, who died in 1751, a local bard recorded:

“Also she was a fruitful vine,

The truth I may relate,
Fourteen was of her body born

And lived to man's estate.

"From these did spring a numerous race

One hundred thirty-two;

Sixty and six each sex alike,

As I declare to you.

"And one thing more remarkable,
Which here I shall record:
She'd fourteen children with her

At the table of our Lord." 1

But before Mrs. Thayer's time, in the previous century, although the birth rate was very high, the mortality, especially among children, was equally great, and the population was at once abundantly replenished and ruthlessly weeded. "Like a tribe of savage men or wild beasts, it was exposed to a pitiless process of selection. Such a process must conduce to the physical vigor of a race; it would develop those qualities which accompany physical vigor and depend on it. But there are other qualities to which it would prove fatal. That the spirit of a Shelley could ever have shaped itself in the life of New England was impossible. But the impossibility dated from a stage earlier than that of training and culture. The birth of a possible Shelley in a Puritan household would have been a striking instance of what physiologists call atavism. But even if the portent had occurred, we may be pretty sure that 'died in infancy' would have been the only record of it in the family register. Physical selection was part of the process which was forcing the character of the American Puritan into a narrow and rigid mould.” 2

Wordsworth could sing of Nature and thrill to the carol of feathered songsters where all around him was orderly cultivation and birds nested in 1 Adams: Three Episodes of Massachusetts History, vol. ii, p. 610. ' Doyle: English Colonies in America, vol. iii, p. 7.

the eaves of barns, and church steeples softened into the beauties of graceful age by time. The pioneer — and the whole people were pioneers saw in the sunrise only the call to another day's toil; there was to him no music in the joyous note of the birds; it was simply a warning to protect his crops from their ravages and to mark the changing seasons. He looked on neither eaves nor steeples.

“I have been thinking all day," said gently the Puritan maiden, "Dreaming all night, and thinking all day, of the hedge-rows of England,

They are in blossom now, and the country is all like a garden; Thinking of lanes and fields, and the song of the lark and the linnet,

Seeing the village street, and familiar faces of neighbors.

You will say it is wrong, but I cannot help it; I almost

Wish myself back in Old England, I feel so lonely and wretched." 1

From Nature savage and spiteful as he knew it the pioneer turned to Nature idealized as the literature of his youth pictured it and found there his solace, regretting what he had lost, perhaps, but animated by that spirit of hope and determination that had sent him forth fearlessly to find liberty; resolute, courageous, unafraid, but with no desire to sing the praises of the Great Mother, stern, forbidding, revengeful.

1 Longfellow: The Courtship of Miles Standish.

CHAPTER VI

NEW ENGLAND THE CRADLE OF RACE

THE history of the United States has been a defiance of precedent and the blazing of a new path in the trackless wilds of social progress. The impulse that led to the English colonization of America was different from that which had controlled other nations in their attempts to found colonies. "The dawn of the seventeenth century rose on a somewhat changed England. Englishmen filled with the new wine of the Renaissance and united under a queen whose rule, despite all its craft and meanness, appealed intensely to their imagination, had dreamt dreams and seen visions. A generation succeeded, not less enterprising, but more patient, more self-denying, more sane. The conception of colonies as centres from which Christianity might be spread through savage lands did not altogether disappear, nor did English emigrants at once give up the idea of rivaling Spain in the race for gold. But these ideas fell into the background. Colonization designed to provide home for surplus population, to expand alike the imports and exports of England, and thereby to develop her naval resources, now became the dominant motive." 1

1 Cambridge Modern History, vol. vii, p. 4