56 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 



of dear Henry Vaughan's rainbow, " Still young and 

 line ! " 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 mir- 

 acle 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, with- 

 out ennobling associations, a scramble of parvenus, with 

 a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through poli- 

 tics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself ? I con- 

 fess, 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 1 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 1 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 



