ywhere. The grandest objects of
sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations. The sky,
the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope and vision
of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in poetry in every
soul which has anything of the divine gift.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished life,
in distinction from a rich and suggestive one. Which our common New
England life might be considered, I will not decide. But there are some
things I think the poet misses in our western Eden. I trust it is not
unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view as they come before us
in so many other aspects.

There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which we
grow. At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked up an
Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow. At Canoe Meadow, in the Berkshire
Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. So everywhere Indian
arrowheads. Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who knows?
who cares? There is no history to the red race,--there is hardly an
individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a tomahawk--there
is the Indian of all time. The story of one red ant is the story of all
red ants. So, the poet, in trying to wing his way back through the life
that has kindled, flitted, and faded along our watercourses and on our
southern hillsides for unknown generations, finds nothing to breathe or
fly in; he meets

"A vast vacuity! all unawares,
Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep."

But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of
ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still
standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's
bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of
the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of
yesterday,--Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as
we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or
Volterra. It makes a man human to live on these old humanized soils.
He cannot help marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a
procession. They say a dead man's hand cures swellings, if laid on them.
There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the Past to take down our
tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.
Rousseau came out of one of his sad self-tortur