For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, developed under purely American conditions, maturing slowly, keeping close to facts, dying, like the old English saint, while he was "still learning," had none of the typical hardness and selfishness of the Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he was one of those "prophetic souls of the wide world dreaming on things to come," with sympathies and imagination that reached out beyond the immediate urgencies of his race and nation to comprehend the universal task and discipline of the sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy this Westerner was not only far in advance of his own day, but he is also far in advance of ours which raises statues to his memory. Yet he was used to loneliness and to the long view, and even across the welter of the World War of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough to see that ship coming into the harbor under full sail. CHAPTER X. A New Nation The changes that have come over the inner spirit and the outward expression of American life since Lincoln's day are enough to startle the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have been accomplished within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The author of one of the many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was William Dean Howells, then an Ohio journalist of twenty-three. In 1917, at the age of eighty, Mr. Howells is still adding to his long row of charming and memorable books. Every phase of American writing since the middle of the last century has fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this loyal follower of the art of literature. As producer, editor, critic, and friend of the foremost writers of his epoch, Mr. Howells has known the books of our new national era as no one else could have known them. Some future historian of the period may piece together, from no other sources than Mr. Howells's writings, an unrivaled picture of our book-making during more than sixty years. All that the present historian can attempt is to sketch with bungling fingers a few men and a few tendencies which seem to characterize the age.