No other literature has so forcibly expressed such an inspiring belief in individuality, the aim to have each human being realize that this plastic world expects to find in him an individual hero. Emerson emphasized "the new importance given to the single person." No philosophy of individuality could be more explicit than Walt Whitman's:-- "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual,--namely to You." This emphasis on individuality is an added incentive to try "to yield that particular fruit which each was created to bear." We feel that the universe is our property and that we shall not stop until we have a clear title to that part which we desire. As we study this literature, the moral greatness of the race seems to course afresh through our veins, and our individual strength becomes the strength of ten. No other nation could have sung America's song of democracy:-- "Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine." The East and the West have vied in singing the song of a new social democracy, in holding up as an ideal a "... love that lives On the errors it forgives," in teaching each mother to sing to her child:-- "Thou art one with the world--though I love thee the best, And to save thee from pain, I must save all the rest. Thou wilt weep; and thy mother must dry The tears of the world, lest her darling should cry." True poets, like the great physicians, minister to life by awakening faith. The singers of New England have made us feel that the Divine Presence stands behind the darkest shadow, that the feeble hands groping blindly in the darkness will touch God's strengthening right hand. Amid the snows of his Northland, Whittier wrote:-- "I know not where his islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond his love and care." Lanier calls from the southern marshes, fringed with the live oaks "and woven shades of the vine":-- "I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies: By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God." The impressive moral lesson taught by American literature is a presence not to be put by. Lowell's utterance is typical of our greatest authors:-- "Not failure, but low aim, is crime." Hawthorne wrote his great masterpiece to express this central truth:-- "To the untrue man, the whole universe is false,--it is impalpable,-- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp." Finally, American literature has striven to impress the truth voiced in these lines:-- "As children of the Infinite Soul Our Birthright is the boundless whole.... "High truths which have not yet been dreamed, Realities of all that seemed.... "No fate can rob the earnest soul Of his great Birthright in the boundless whole!"