each other in the face.  They have met, it may be, with the rudest kind of greetings; but have obtained good thoughts from hard blows, and beaten ideas out of each other’s heads, if not into them, according to the ancient pedagogic tradition.  Higher culture brings higher terms of meeting; traffic succeeds war, conversation follows upon traffic; ever the necessity of various men to each other remains.  There is no pure white light until seven colors blend; so to the mental illumination of humanity many hues of national genius must consent:  and the value of life to all men is greater so soon as a new man has made his advent.

All this is matter of daily experience with us.  We do not, indeed, tire of old friends.  A soul whose wealth we have once recognized must be ever rich to us.  Gold turns not to copper by keeping; and perhaps old friends are rather like old wine, and can never be too old.  Yet who does not mark in the calendar those days wherein he has met a new rich soul, that has a physiognomy, a grace and expression, peculiarly its own?  Even decided repulsions have also a use.  We whet our conscience on our neighbors’ faults, as sober Spartans were made by the spectacle of drunken Helots;—­though he who makes habitual talk about his neighbors’ faults whets his conscience across the edge.  If there be sermons in stones, no less is there blessing in bores and in bullies.  We found one day in the face of a black bear what could not be so well found in libraries.  The creature regarded us attentively, and with affection rather than malice,—­saw simply certain amounts of savory flesh, useful for the satisfaction of ursine hungers,—­and saw nothing more.  It was an incomparable lesson to teach that the world is an endless series of levels, and that each eye sees what its own altitude commands; the rest to it is non-extant. That bear was in his natural covering of hair; his brothers we frequently meet in broadcloth.

Now, as Nature keeps up this inexhaustible variety of individual genius which individual quickening requires, so on the larger scale is she ever working and compounding to produce varieties of national genius.  Her aim is the same in both cases,—­to enrich the whole by this electrical and enlivening relation between its parts.  And thus an American man, no copy, but an original, formed in unprecedented moulds, with his own unborrowed grandeur, his own piquancy and charm, is to be looked for,—­is, indeed, even now to be seen,—­on this shore.

Yes, the man we seek is already found, his features rapidly becoming distinct.  He is the offspring of Northern Europe; he occupies Central North-America.  Other fresh forms are doubtless to appear, but, though dimly shaping themselves, are as yet inchoate.  But the Anglo-American is an existing fact, to be spoken of without prognostication, save as this is implied in the recognition of tendencies established and unfolding into results.  The Anglo-American may be considered the latest new-comer into this planet.  Let us, then, a little celebrate his advent.  Let us make all lawful and gentle inquiry about the distinguished stranger.