ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 43 



in finding the old tree and shabby fence still there under the 

 travesty of falling night, nay, were conscious of an un 

 suspected newness in familiar stars and the fading outlines of 

 hills my earliest horizon, I was conscious of an immortal 

 soul, and could not but rejoice in the unwaning goodliness of 

 the world into which I had been born without any merit of 

 my own. I thought of dear Henry Vaughan s rainbow, 

 Still young and fine ! I remembered people who had to go 

 over to the Alps to learn what the divine silence of snow was, 

 who must run to Italy before they were conscious of the 

 miracle wrought every day under their very noses by the 

 sunset ; who must call upon the Berkshire hills to teach 

 them what a painter autumn was, while close at hand the 

 Fresh Pond meadows made all oriels cheap with hues that 

 showed as if a sunset cloud had been wrecked among their 

 maples. One might be worse off than even in America, I 

 thought. There are some things so elastic that even the 

 heavy roller of democracy cannot flatten them altogether 

 down. The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of 

 its own thoughts and dwell a hermit anywhere. A country 

 without traditions, without ennobling associations, a scramble 

 otparvemts, with a horrible consciousness of shoddy running 

 through politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself ? 

 I confess it did not seem so to me there in that illimitable 

 quiet, that serene self-possession of nature, where Collins 

 might have brooded his Ode to Evening/ or where those 

 verses on Solitude in Dodsley s Collection, that Hawthorne 

 liked so much, might have been composed. Traditions ? 

 Granting that we had none, all that is worth having in them 

 is the common property of the soul an estate in gavelkind 

 for all the sons of Adam and, moreover, if a man cannot 

 stand on his two feet (the prime quality of whoever has left 

 any tradition behind him), were it not better for him to be 

 honest about it at once, and go down on all-fours ? And for 

 associations, if one have not the wit to make them for 

 himself out of his native earth, no ready-made ones of other 

 men will avail him much. Lexington is none the worse to me 

 for not being in Greece, nor Gettysburg that its name is not 

 Marathon. Blessed old fields/ I was just exclaiming to 

 myself, like one of Mrs. Radcliffe s heroes, dear acres, 

 innocently secure from history, which these eyes first beheld, 

 may you be also those to which they shall at last slowly 



