50 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 



any merit of my own. I thought of dear Henry Vaughan s 

 rainbow, u Still young and fine ! &quot; 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 Berk 

 shire 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 of parvenus, with a 

 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 &quot; Ode to Evening,&quot; 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 gavel-kind 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 Gettsyburg that its name is not 

 Marathon. &quot; Blessed old fields,&quot; I was just exclaiming to 

 myself, like one of Mrs. Kadcliffe s heroes, &quot; dear acres, 

 innocently secure from history, which these eyes first 

 beheld, may you be also those to which they shall at last 

 slowly darken 1 &quot; when I was interrupted by a voice which 



