Emerson is continually urging us to give heed to this grand voice of hills and streams, and to mould ourselves upon its suggestions. The difficulty and the anomaly are that we are not native; that England is our mother, quite as much as Monadnoc; that we are heirs of memories and traditions reaching far beyond the times and the confines of the Republic. We cannot assume the splendid childlikeness of the great primitive races, and exhibit the hairy strength and unconscious genius that the poet longs to find in us. He remarks somewhere that the culminating period of good in nature and the world is in just that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acidity is got out by ethics and humanity. It was at such a period that Greece attained her apogee; but our experience, it seems to me, must needs be different. Our story is not of birth, but of regeneration, a far more subtle and less obvious transaction. The Homeric California of which Bret Harte is the reporter does not seem to me in the closest sense American. It is a comparatively superficial matter--this savage freedom and raw poetry; it belongs to all pioneering life, where every man must stand for himself, and Judge Lynch strings up the defaulter to the nearest tree. But we are only incidentally pioneers in this sense; and the characteristics thus impressed upon us will leave no traces in the completed American. "A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont," says Emerson, "who in turn tries all the professions--who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet--is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not studying a 'profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already." That is stirringly said: but, as a matter of fact, most of the Americans whom we recognize as great did not have such a history; nor, if they had it, would they be on that account more American. On the other hand, the careers of men like Jim Fiske and Commodore Vanderbilt might serve very well as illustrations of the above sketch. If we must wait for our character until our geographical advantages and the absence of social distinctions manufacture it for us, we are likely to remain a long while in suspense. When our foreign visitors begin to evince a more poignant interest in Concord and Fifth Avenue than in the Mississippi and the Yellowstone, it may be an indication to us that we are assuming our proper position relative to our physical environment. "The _land_," says Emerson, "is a sanative and Americanizing influence which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come." Well, when we are virtuous, we may, perhaps, spare our own blushes by allowing our topography, symbolically, to celebrate us, and when our admirers would