E. A. SILSBEE'S REMARKS. 17 



type, taste and endeavor. Now it is till trade ; what 

 would England have been all Manchester and Liverpool? 

 We need something to temper us. Where is it to come 

 from? It is an embryonic country here in its oldest 

 phase. The humanities will come hereafter. We cannot 

 concentrate. We are always flying off at the "handle. 

 We keep green, raw-boned, unformed. *' 



In New England we have what has never Jbeen seen in 

 the world before, devout free thinking. The English 

 have come to it through science, the French through 

 scorn, the Germans through metaphysics. The Ger- 

 mans have deepened the thought of the world though 

 their character is not equal to their mind, nor is their lit- 

 erature based on it, but has grown up in a late and sophis- 

 ticated age out of a literary class. They are intellectually 

 free though politically bound and for that very reason, 

 having no harmoniously developed life, social, commer- 

 cial, and civic, all classes mixed and cooperating, are 

 prone to the coarsest atheism, or sanctimonious, as in the 

 French war. The French are socially free and equal 

 though religiously bound and now working out of despot- 

 ism. The English how socially bound ! and we by 

 trade, and in a sense both, religiously. England is a 

 preserve of gentlemen, this the country of mankind. 

 Our greatest production is public characters which are 

 the most straightforward, the best the world has seen, 

 Washington, Franklin, Lincoln, the saviour of democ- 

 racy. We cannot be diplomatic in this young land. 

 The American is transparent and has taught tlfe world 

 simplicity, cured it of tortuousness, artificiality and stilt- 

 edness. 



For passion let me quote Wordsworth's lines on "Lon- 

 don Bridge," the commonest sight in the world, but 

 memorably impressive. Who but a great poet could have 



ESSEX INST. BULLETIN, VOL. XIII. 2 



