in the adjacent city of Cambridge, and no invidious comparison is intended or will be felt if they, with their poets and historians and men of letters at that time, with their peculiar atmosphere, instinct then and now with a life athletic, learned, business-like and religious, are taken to show the dawning capacities of the new nation.  No places in the United States exhibit more visibly the kinship of America with England, yet in none certainly can a stranger see more readily that America is independent of the Old World in something more than politics.  Many of their streets and buildings would in England seem redolent of the past, yet no cities of the Eastern States played so large a part in the development, material and mental, of the raw and vigorous West.  The limitations of their greatest writers are in a manner the sign of their achievement.  It would have been contrary to all human analogy if a country, in such an early stage of creation out of such a chaos, had put forth books marked strongly as its own and yet as the products of a mature national mind.  It would also have been surprising if since the Civil War the rush of still more appalling and more complex practical problems had not obstructed for a while the flow of imaginative or scientific production.  But the growth of those relatively early years was great.  Boston had been the home of a loveless Christianity; its insurrection in the War of Independence had been soiled by shifty dealing and mere acidity; but Boston from the days of Emerson to those of Phillips Brooks radiated a temper and a mental force that was manly, tender, and clean.  The man among these writers about whose exact rank, neither low nor very high among poets, there can be least dispute was Longfellow.  He might seem from his favourite subjects to be hardly American; it was his deliberately chosen task to bring to the new country some savour of things gentle and mellow caught from the literature of Europe.  But, in the first place, no writer could in the detail of his work have been more racy of that New England countryside which lay round his home; and, in the second place, no writer could have spoken more unerringly to the ear of the whole wide America of which his home was a little part.  It seems strange to couple the name of this mild and scholarly man with the thought of that crude Western world to which we must in a moment pass.  But the connection is real and vital.  It is well shown in the appreciation written of him and his fellows by the American writer who most violently contrasts with him, Walt Whitman.

A student of American history may feel something like the experience which is common among travellers in America.  When they come home they cannot tell their friends what really interested them.  Ugly things and very dull things are prominent in their story, as in the tales of American humorists.  The general impression they convey is of something tiresomely extensive, distractingly miscellaneous,