of liberal learning and rare opportunities, and looks upon the intellectual poverty of the world without a wish to relieve it.  “As often as I have been among men,” says Seneca, “I have returned less a man.”  And Thomas a Kempis declared that “the greatest saints avoided the company of men as much as they could, and chose to live to God in secret.”  The Christian philosophy was no improvement upon the pagan in this respect, and was exactly at variance with the teaching and practice of Jesus of Nazareth.

The American scholar cannot afford to live for himself, nor merely for scholarship and the delights of learning.  He must make himself more felt in the material life of this country.  I am aware that it is said that the culture of the age is itself materialistic, and that its refinements are sensual; that there is little to choose between the coarse excesses of poverty and the polished and more decorous animality of the more fortunate.  Without entering directly upon the consideration of this much-talked-of tendency, I should like to notice the influence upon our present and probable future of the bounty, fertility, and extraordinary opportunities of this still new land.

The American grows and develops himself with few restraints.  Foreigners used to describe him as a lean, hungry, nervous animal, gaunt, inquisitive, inventive, restless, and certain to shrivel into physical inferiority in his dry and highly oxygenated atmosphere.  This apprehension is not well founded.  It is quieted by his achievements the continent over, his virile enterprises, his endurance in war and in the most difficult explorations, his resistance of the influence of great cities towards effeminacy and loss of physical vigor.  If ever man took large and eager hold of earthly things and appropriated them to his own use, it is the American.  We are gross eaters, we are great drinkers.  We shall excel the English when we have as long practice as they.  I am filled with a kind of dismay when I see the great stock-yards of Chicago and Cincinnati, through which flow the vast herds and droves of the prairies, marching straight down the throats of Eastern people.  Thousands are always sowing and reaping and brewing and distilling, to slake the immortal thirst of the country.  We take, indeed, strong hold of the earth; we absorb its fatness.  When Leicester entertained Elizabeth at Kenilworth, the clock in the great tower was set perpetually at twelve, the hour of feasting.  It is always dinner-time in America.  I do not know how much land it takes to raise an average citizen, but I should say a quarter section.  He spreads himself abroad, he riots in abundance; above all things he must have profusion, and he wants things that are solid and strong.  On the Sorrentine promontory, and on the island of Capri, the hardy husbandman and fisherman draws his subsistence from the sea and from a scant patch of ground.  One may feast on a fish and a handful of olives.  The dinner of the laborer