ns of
decent and social utterance. Like the men and women described in
Locker-Lampson's verses, Americans

"eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,--
They go to church on Sunday;
And many are afraid of God--
And more of Mrs. Grundy."

Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most desirable of literary
divinities, but the student of classical literature can easily think of
other divinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman verse, who
are distinctly less desirable still.

"Not passion, but sentiment," said Hawthorne, in a familiar passage of
criticism of his own _Twice-Told Tales_. How often must the student of
American literature echo that half-melancholy but just verdict, as he
surveys the transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of our
earlier writers to the sentimental qualities which have brought popular
recognition to the many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism
shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, and yet its spiritual
passion made the word "soul" sublime. The reaction against Calvinism
has made religion more human, natural, and possibly more Christlike,
but "soul" has lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards
pronounced the word. Emerson and Hawthorne, far as they had escaped
from the bonds of their ancestral religion, still utter the word "soul"
with awe. But in the popular sermon and hymn and story of our
day,--with their search after the sympathetic and the sentimental,
after what is called in magazine slang "heart-interest,"--the word has
lost both its intellectual distinction and its literary magic. It will
regain neither until it is pronounced once more with spiritual passion.

But in literature, as in other things, we must take what we can get.
The great mass of our American writing is sentimental, because it has
been produced by, and for, an excessively sentimental people. The poems
in Stedman's carefully chosen _Anthology_, the prose and verse in the
two volume Stedman-Hutchinson collection of American Literature, the
Library of Southern Literature, and similar sectional anthologies, the
school Readers and Speakers,--particularly in the half-century between
1830 and 1880,--our newspapers and magazines,--particularly the
so-called "yellow" newspapers and the illustrated magazines typified by
_Harper's Monthly_,--are all fairly dripping with sentiment. American
oratory is notoriously the most sentimental oratory of the civilized
world. The _Congressional R