nown valley of the
musically-sounding Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual feeder of
the springs of romance. John Wesley, it will be remembered, went out to
the colony of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting the Indians;
but as he naively remarks in his _Journal_, he "neither found or heard
of any Indians on the continent of America, who had the least desire of
being instructed." The sense of fact, in other words, supervenes, and
the glory disappears from the face of romance. The humor of Mark
Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ turns largely upon this sense of remorseless
fact confronting romantic inexperience.

American history, however, has been marked by certain great romantic
passions that seem endowed with indestructible vitality. The romance of
discovery, the fascination of the forest and sea, the sense of danger
and mystery once aroused by the very word "redskin," have all moulded
and will continue to mould the national imagination. How completely
the romance of discovery may be fused with the glow of humanitarian
and religious enthusiasm has been shown once for all in the brilliant
pages of Parkman's story of the Jesuit missions in Canada. Pictorial
romance can scarcely go further than this. In the crisis of
Chateaubriand's picturesque and passionate tale of the American
wilderness, no one can escape the thrilling, haunting sound of the bell
from the Jesuit chapel, as it tolls in the night and storm that were
fatal to the happiness of Atala. One scarcely need say that the romance
of missions has never faded from the American mind. I have known a
sober New England deacon aged eighty-five, who disliked to die because
he thought he should miss the monthly excitement of reading the
_Missionary Herald_. The deacon's eyes, like the eyes of many an old
sea-captain in Salem or Newburyport, were literally upon the ends of
the earth. No one can reckon how many starved souls, deprived of normal
outlet for human feeling, have found in this passionate curiosity and
concern for the souls of black and yellow men and women in the
antipodes, a constant source of beneficent excitement.

Nor is there any diminution of interest in the mere romance of
adventure, in the stories of hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis
and Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett. In writing his superb
romances of the Northern Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimore
Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus sentiments that lay
deep i