The benumbing influence of antiquity--or rather of that extended period which may be called the Aristotelian age, the age in which all philosophic thought was utterly benumbed by the Greek literature--has not yet passed away. American writers are just beginning to get rid of their absolute subserviency to foreign models in all things, and in this partial independence they are still subservient to the fundamental philosophic and ethical ideas of the past. The change that is taking place is only in minor matters. Even so graceful and able a writer as Longfellow illustrates fully the truth of these suggestions. Mr. Charles F. Johnson, in a well-written essay on Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, says: "Most people feel that national temper is of slow evolution; that many heterogeneous elements must be fused and blended here; that we too must have a past, and that the spirit of our past must be taken up and transmitted before a new type is realized in a new art and a new literature. We can see that Longfellow was essentially a scholar--a receiver of impressions from books; that he was like an AEolian harp, blown upon by many winds, so that his music was in many regards necessarily a melodious echo of what was 'whispered by world-wandering winds.' And we can see, too, that he came into American literary life just as it was passing from the germ to the plant, and that every year he became more distinctive." There is nothing profound in this view, but it expresses well the average thought of the period,--that Americanism in literature must be the very gradual growth of new circumstances, experience, and associations, which may superficially modify the unbroken mass of thought which has been transplanted from Europe, just as vines and flowers take on their modifications in a new soil and climate. Far different from this is the view that anthropology gives us. The foreign plant, it is true, will gradually change, but a native plant will ultimately take its place by the law of the "survival of the fittest." The exotic must die out, for it was but a hothouse plant, reared in universities and cathedrals. The thought, the science, the philosophy, and even the forms of literary expression, for this continent, will be those which spring from the bosom of nature, fresh and strong, imbued with the spiritual element of immortality, the element of luminous originality.