508 THE MOUNTAIN. 



be an emanation from the human mind indorsed by human 

 reason. However, being a German peasant, acknowledged 

 by all to be profoundly ignorant of everything, error or in- 

 apprehension as to what the world had been doing, or 

 dreaming, and trying to do, for six thousand years, in the 

 shape of sciences and literatures, was to be expected. 



But is it expected that the New World will indorse this 

 hallucination of an ignorant serf ? Undoubtedly cleanliness 

 is akin to godliness ; the virtue of washing is infinite, and 

 there is no end to the glory of water; but that hydropathy is 

 an " art and science among established things," was reserved 

 for the poet of the "isms" to sing or say. The North 

 American continent takes up the rusty hoaxes of the Old 

 "World, makes them run the gauntlet of Yankeedom new 

 varnished and patched up in decayed and gone parts, never, 

 however, touching them until exploded in the country where 

 they rose, and " courteously declining to take up a German 

 theory until the Germans had ^quite done with it and thrown 

 it away for something new." The hopeful and aspirant 

 have thus been disappointed continually. When the genius 

 of history recorded the discovery of a new hemisphere, and 

 hailed with joy the new-born giant's smile, the heart of 

 man was glad with hopes for the dawn of light upon some 

 undiscovered continents of the soul, commensurate in their 

 boundless exuberance and exhaustless profusion, with those 

 which Nature had provided as the theatre of untried colossal 

 physical experiments and expansions of the races. With 

 rnournfulness and despair, behold the result ! In their 

 migration, with superstitious veneration, they carried the 

 ashes of the dead with them, and with sedulous fear im- 

 ported the mouldy skeleton-forms of departed polities, reli- 

 gions, literatures, and philosophies, and when men of prayer 

 and hope, men of progressive instincts and faith in the 

 onward growth and beneficent advancement of all things, 

 looked to find that the old and effete skins had been sloughed 

 off by a new expansion, and cast aside, the narrow and 

 stony shells cracked and burst asunder by a new growth, 



