is a dish of polenta, a few figs, some cheese, a glass of thin wine.  His wants are few and easily supplied.  He is not overfed, his diet is not stimulating; I should say that he would pay little to the physician, that familiar of other countries whose family office is to counteract the effects of over-eating.  He is temperate, frugal, content, and apparently draws not more of his life from the earth or the sea than from the genial sky.  He would never build a Pacific Railway, nor write a hundred volumes of commentary on the Scriptures; but he is an example of how little a man actually needs of the gross products of the earth.

I suppose that life was never fuller in certain ways than it is here in America.  If a civilization is judged by its wants, we are certainly highly civilized.  We cannot get land enough, nor clothes enough, nor houses enough, nor food enough.  A Bedouin tribe would fare sumptuously on what one American family consumes and wastes.  The revenue required for the wardrobe of one woman of fashion would suffice to convert the inhabitants of I know not how many square miles in Africa.  It absorbs the income of a province to bring up a baby.  We riot in prodigality, we vie with each other in material accumulation and expense.  Our thoughts are mainly on how to increase the products of the world; and get them into our own possession.

I think this gross material tendency is strong in America, and more likely to get the mastery over the spiritual and the intellectual here than elsewhere, because of our exhaustless resources.  Let us not mistake the nature of a real civilization, nor suppose we have it because we can convert crude iron into the most delicate mechanism, or transport ourselves sixty miles an hour, or even if we shall refine our carnal tastes so as to be satisfied at dinner with the tongues of ortolans and the breasts of singing-birds.

Plato banished the musicians from his feasts because he would not have the charms of conversation interfered with.  By comparison, music was to him a sensuous enjoyment.  In any society the ideal must be the banishment of the more sensuous; the refinement of it will only repeat the continued experiment of history—­the end of a civilization in a polished materialism, and its speedy fall from that into grossness.

I am sure that the scholar, trained to “plain living and high thinking,” knows that the prosperous life consists in the culture of the man, and not in the refinement and accumulation of the material.  The word culture is often used to signify that dainty intellectualism which is merely a sensuous pampering of the mind, as distinguishable from the healthy training of the mind as is the education of the body in athletic exercises from the petting of it by luxurious baths and unguents.  Culture is the blossom of knowledge, but it is a fruit blossom, the ornament of the age but the seed of the future.  The so-called culture, a mere fastidiousness of taste, is a barren flower.