This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general; that more practical, positive direction is what we want; that Emerson’s optimism, self-reliance, and indifference to favourable conditions for our life and growth have in them something of danger. ‘Trust thyself;’ ‘what attracts my attention shall have it;’ ‘though thou shouldst walk the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble;’ ‘what we call vulgar society is that society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as any.’ With maxims like these, we surely, it may be said, run some risk of being made too well satisfied with our own actual self and state, however crude and imperfect they may be. ‘Trust thyself?’ It may be said that the common American or Englishman is more than enough disposed already to trust himself. I often reply, when our sectarians are praised for following conscience: Our people are very good in following their conscience; where they are not so good is in ascertaining whether their conscience tells them right. ‘What attracts my attention shall have it?’ Well, that is our people’s plea when they run after the Salvation Army, and desire Messrs. Moody and Sankey. ‘Thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble?’ But think of the turn of the good people of our race for producing a life of hideousness and immense ennui; think of that specimen of your own New England life which Mr. Howells gives us in one of his charming stories which I was reading lately; think of the life of that ragged New England farm in the _Lady of the Aroostook_; think of Deacon Blood, and Aunt Maria, and the straight-backed chairs with black horse-hair seats, and Ezra Perkins with perfect self-reliance depositing his travellers in the snow! I can truly say that in the little which I have seen of the life of New England, I am more struck with what has been achieved than with the crudeness and failure. But no doubt there is still a great deal of crudeness also. Your own novelists say there is, and I suppose they say true. In the New England, as in the Old, our people have to learn, I suppose, not that their modes of life are beautiful and excellent already; they have rather to learn that they must transform them.