Washington, recommended to their countrymen, because they were virtues that justified themselves visibly by their fruits.  But soon these happy results themselves helped to relax the pressure of external circumstances, and indirectly the pressure of the agonised conscience within.  The nation became numerous; it ceased to be either ecstatic or distressful; the high social morality which on the whole it preserved took another colour; people remained honest and helpful out of good sense and good will rather than out of scrupulous adherence to any fixed principles.  They retained their instinct for order, and often created order with surprising quickness; but the sanctity of law, to be obeyed for its own sake, began to escape them; it seemed too unpractical a notion, and not quite serious.  In fact, the second and native-born American mentality began to take shape.  The sense of sin totally evaporated.  Nature, in the words of Emerson, was all beauty and commodity; and while operating on it laboriously, and drawing quick returns, the American began to drink in inspiration from it aesthetically.  At the same time, in so broad a continent, he had elbow-room.  His neighbours helped more than they hindered him; he wished their number to increase.  Good will became the great American virtue; and a passion arose for counting heads, and square miles, and cubic feet, and minutes saved—­as if there had been anything to save them for.  How strange to the American now that saying of Jonathan Edwards, that men are naturally God’s enemies!  Yet that is an axiom to any intelligent Calvinist, though the words he uses may be different.  If you told the modern American that he is totally depraved, he would think you were joking, as he himself usually is.  He is convinced that he always has been, and always will be, victorious and blameless.

Calvinism thus lost its basis in American life.  Some emotional natures, indeed, reverted in their religious revivals or private searchings of heart to the sources of the tradition; for any of the radical points of view in philosophy may cease to be prevalent, but none can cease to be possible.  Other natures, more sensitive to the moral and literary influences of the world, preferred to abandon parts of their philosophy, hoping thus to reduce the distance which should separate the remainder from real life.

Meantime, if anybody arose with a special sensibility or a technical genius, he was in great straits; not being fed sufficiently by the world, he was driven in upon his own resources.  The three American writers whose personal endowment was perhaps the finest—­Poe, Hawthorne, and Emerson—­had all a certain starved and abstract quality.  They could not retail the genteel tradition; they were too keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that.  But life offered them little digestible material, nor were they naturally voracious.  They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were starved.  Emerson, to be sure, fed on books.  There was a