of American idealism. Books devoted to the "Spirit of
America"--like the volume by Henry van Dyke which bears that very
title--give a programme of national accomplishments and aspirations.
But our immediate task is more specific. It is to point out how
adequately this idealistic side of the national temperament has been
expressed in American writing. Has our literature kept equal pace with
our thinking and feeling?

We do not need, in attempting to answer this question, any definition
of idealism, in its philosophical or in its more purely literary sense.
There are certain fundamental human sentiments which lift men above
brutes, Frenchmen above "frog-eaters," and Englishmen above
"shop-keepers." These ennobling sentiments or ideals, while universal
in their essential nature, assume in each civilized nation a somewhat
specific coloring. The national literature reveals the myriad shades
and hues of private and public feeling, and the more truthful this
literary record, the more delicate and noble become the harmonies of
local and national thought or emotion with the universal instincts and
passions of mankind. On the other hand, when the literature of Spain,
for instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, in range and
depth of human interest, we are compelled to believe either that the
Spain or Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler ideals, or that
it lacked literary interpretation.

In the case of America we are confronted by a similar dilemma. Since
the beginning of the seventeenth century this country has been, in a
peculiar sense, the home of idealism; but our literature has remained
through long periods thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan
significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day that only three or four
of our writers have aroused any strong interest in the cultivated
readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then, either the torch of
American idealism does not burn as brightly as we think, or else our
writers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto possessed the
height and reach and grasp to hold up the torch so that the world could
see it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at the torch-bearers.

Readers of Carlyle have often been touched by the humility with which
that disinherited child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine of the
"Three Reverences," as set forth in _Wilhelm Meister_. Again and again,
in his correspondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur to that
te