The most striking characteristic of the older, as of the younger, New England literature is its deep and beautiful humanism, the closeness of its touch upon experience, the warmth of its sympathy with men and women in contact with the great movement of life. Growing out of such a soil, it could hardly have been otherwise, for New England represents, not an abstraction, but a commanding faith in personality, the clear self-realization of a man whose obligation goes straight to God, and to whom God's word travels like an arrow's flight. In one form or another, all the New England writers deal with this theme; they are concerned, not with abstractions, but with the hopes and fears and temptations of man. Hawthorne is absorbed in the problem of the return of a man's deed, or of his ancestors' deed upon himself; Lowell cares supremely for nobility and freedom of impulse, act and deed; Whittier for truth and spiritual fellowship; Emerson, for the reality of spiritual force and meaning in common duties and ordinary relations; Longfellow, for the tenderness and purity of childhood, the sweetness and fragrance of family relations, the charm of historic association; Holmes, for the endless paradox and surprise which are in human thought and conduct; Brooks, for the abundance of man's life and the fulness of its spiritual possibilities; Curtis, for a public life at once pure, free, rich and stable. For all these writers organization and institutions had great interest, but they cared primarily for the men whose history these institutions represent. The quays at Geneva are massive and shine at night like a constellation; but our interest centres in the river which rushes between them from the Alps to the sea. This is a democratic note, but there is another quite as distinct and characteristic--the note of buoyant cheerfulness, faith in God and man. There is a ringing tone in the literature of New England which is not only a protest against any form of oppression, but a challenge to fate. That courage came from faith in the divine order of life. And that buoyant courage and cheerfulness were possible because these writers kept life and art in harmony. There was no schism between ideal and action in them. They not only followed the vision in spirit; they lived in the light of it. They illustrated that unity of life without which there is no God. They kept in the way of growth and truth and inspiration because they lived wisely. We do not half value their splendid sanity. A manly and noble moral health was theirs. They rang true to every moral appeal. They were not only men of letters, but they were also gentlemen, and they have associated literature in the thought of the country with dignity, culture and beauty of life--Emerson's unworldliness, Lowell's loyalty to truth, and Curtis's splendid rectitude, as enduring as the granite, are of lasting value to the higher life of the nation.