ncoln proudly in one of
his famous debates of 1858; "I was raised just a little east of here";
and this nearness to the audience, this directness and simplicity and
genuineness of our best political literature, its homely persuasiveness
and force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting.

Bible and meeting-house, school-house and town-meeting, thus illustrate
concretely the responsiveness of the American character to idealistic
impulses. They are external symbols of a certain state of mind. It may
indeed be urged that they are primarily signs of a moral and social or
institutional trend, and are therefore non-literary evidence of
American idealism. Nevertheless, institutional as they may be deemed,
they lie close to that poetry of daily duty in which our literature has
not been poor. They are fundamentally related to that attitude of mind,
that habitual temper of the spirit, which has produced, in all
countries of settled use and wont, the literature of idealism.
Brunetiere said of Flaubert's most famous woman character that poor
Emma Bovary, the prey and the victim of Romantic desires, was after all
much like the rest of us except that she lacked the intelligence to
perceive the charm and poetry of the daily task. We have already
touched upon the purely romantic side of American energy and of
American imagination, and we must shortly look more closely still at
those impulses of daring, those moods of heightened feeling, that
intensified individualism, the quest of strangeness and terror and
wild beauty, which characterize our romantic writing. But this
romanticism is, as it were, a segment of the larger circle of idealism.
It is idealism accentuated by certain factors, driven to
self-expression by the passions of scorn or of desire; it exceeds, in
one way or another, the normal range of experience and emotion. Our
romantic American literature is doubtless our greatest. And yet some of
the most characteristic tendencies of American writing are to be found
in the poetry of daily experience, in the quiet accustomed light that
falls upon one's own doorway and garden, in the immemorial charm of
going forth to one's labor and returning in the evening,--poetry old as
the world.

* * * * *

Let us see how this glow of idealism touches some of the more intimate
aspects of human experience. "Out of the three Reverences," says
Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for
Oneself.