The reaction from romance, therefore, real as it is, and dead weight as it lies upon the soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces which destroy it. In other words, the reaction against one type of romance produces inevitably another type of romance, other aspects of wonder, terror, and beauty. Following the romance of adventure comes, after never so deep a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like the crest of another wave; and then comes what we call, for lack of a better word, the psychological romance, the old mystery and strangeness of the human soul, Æschylus and Job, as Victor Hugo says, in the poor crawfish gatherer on the rocks of Brittany. We must remember that we are endeavoring to measure great spaces and to take account of the "amplitude of time." The individual "fact-man," as Coleridge called him, remains perhaps a fact-man to the end, just as the dreamer may remain a dreamer. But no single generation is compounded all of fact or all of dream. Longfellow felt, no doubt, that there was an ideal United States, which Dickens did not discover during that first visit of 1842; he would have set the Cambridge which he knew over against the Cincinnati viewed by Mrs. Trollope; he would have asserted that the homes characterized by refinement, by cultivation, by pure and simple sentiment, made up the true America. But even among Longfellow's own contemporaries there was Whitman, who felt that the true America was something very different from that exquisitely tempered ideal of Longfellow. There was Thoreau, who, over in Concord, had been pushing forward the frontier of the mind and senses, who had opened his back-yard gate, as it were, upon the boundless and mysterious territory of Nature. There was Emerson, who was preaching an intellectual independence of the Old World which should correspond to the political and social independence of the Western Hemisphere. There was Parkman, whose hatred of philanthropy, whose lack of spirituality, is a striking illustration of the rebound of New England idealism against itself, of the reaction into stoicism. What different worlds these men lived in, and yet they were all inhabitants, so to speak, of the same parish; most of them met often around the same table! The lesson of their variety of experience and differences of gifts as workmen in that great palace of literature which is so variously built, is that no action and reaction in the imaginative world is ever final. Least of all do these actions and reactions affect the fortunes of true romance. The born dreamer may fall from one dream into another, but he still murmurs, in the famous line of William Ellery Channing,-- "If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea." No line in our literature is more truly American,--unless it be that other splendid metaphor, by David Wasson, which says the same thing in other words:--