“Hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates,” confessed in the end: “Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around.” Very beautiful are these rainbow visions--but they are conjured out of night. II Let us turn to a second sort of hope--the hope of an American paradise of nature. Although the paradise of nature appears in Vergil, in Renaissance pastorals by Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser, in Perdita’s shepherd home and in the sylvan cave of Cymbeline’s sons, its use was mainly either decorative or allegorical until the eighteenth century. In 1711 Shaftesbury proclaimed the natural man benevolent, compassionate, and altruistic; and as such he appears in _Ossian_. Pope said, “The state of Nature was the reign of God.” Rousseau broadcast the doctrine that civilisation had tended to corrupt the morals of mankind, while he described the enchanting life of man in a natural paradise. Cowper united literary simplicity, religious emotionalism, and the naturalistic humanitarianism of Rousseau. Burns glorified the simple peasant close to nature. And Coleridge and Southey dreamed fondly of an American Pantisocracy--“A Dell of Peace and Equality”--on the banks of the Susquehanna. In 1771, Philip Freneau, our first man of letters, deriving his radical democracy and his devotion to the indigenous scene from naturalism, envisaged “The Rising Glory of America”: “A new Jerusalem, sent down from heaven, Shall grace our happy earth, ... Thence called _Millennium_. Paradise anew Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost ... No tempting serpent to allure the soul From native innocence.” Indeed, it is interesting to speculate upon the extent to which this English romantic faith in the “native innocence” of mankind, transplanted to the inexhaustible resources of the American frontier, has under these unique conditions furnished philosophic sanction for an unbridled materialism which has become so characteristically national. Frontier isolation tended to breed self-confidence, equality, self-reliance, optimism, contempt for artificial distinctions and a dependence upon the material world. Crèvecœur in 1782 defined “an American” as a “new man who acts upon new principles.” “We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be.”