on, of which
Bossuet's famous sermon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England may serve
to remind us, which illustrates significantly the national idealism. I
mean the commemorative oration. The addresses upon the Pilgrim Fathers
by such orators as Everett, Webster, and Choate; the countless orations
before such organizations as the New England Society of New York and
the Phi Beta Kappa; the papers read before historical and patriotic
societies; the birthday and centenary discourses upon national figures
like Washington or Lincoln, have all performed, and are still
performing, an inestimable service in stimulating popular loyalty to
the idealism of the fathers. As literature, most of this production is
derivative: we listen to eloquence about the Puritans, but we do not
read the Puritans; the description of Arthur Dimmesdale's election
sermon in _The Scarlet Letter_, moving as it may be, tempts no one to
open the stout collections of election sermons in the libraries. Yet
the original literature of mediaeval chivalry is known only to a few
scholars: Tennyson's _Idylls_ outsell the _Mabinogion_ and Malory. The
actual world of literature is always shop-worn; a world chiefly of
second-hand books, of warmed-over emotions and it is not surprising
that many listeners to orations about Lincoln do not personally emulate
Lincoln, and that many of the most enthusiastic dealers in the
sentiment of the ancestral meeting-house do not themselves attend
church.

The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal Commonwealth are no less
significant of our national disposition. Take the school-house. It was
planted in the wilderness for the training of boys and girls and for a
future "godly and learned ministry." The record of American education
is a long story of idealism which has touched literature at every turn.
The "red school-house" on the hill-top or at the cross-roads, the
"log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets, the universities founded by great
states, are all a record of the American faith--which has sometimes
been called a fetich--in education. In its origin, it was a part of the
essential programme of Calvinism to make a man able to judge for
himself upon the most momentous questions; a programme, too, of that
political democracy which lay embedded in the tenets of Calvinism, a
democracy which believes and must continue to believe that an educated
electorate can safeguard its own interests and train up its own
leaders. The poetry of the