nd a nursery for
romantic emotion. The out-of-doors movement which began with Thoreau's
hut on Walden Pond, and which has gone on broadening and deepening to
this hour, implies far more than mere variation from routine. It
furnishes, indeed, a healthful escape from the terrific pressure of
modern social and commercial exigencies. Yet its more important
function is to provide for grown-ups a chance to "play Indian" too.

But outdoors and indoors, after all, lie in the heart and mind, rather
than in the realm of actual experience. The romantic imagination
insists upon taking its holiday, whether the man who possesses it gets
his holiday or not. I have never known a more truly romantic figure
than a certain tin-pedler in Connecticut who, in response to the
question, "Do you do a good business?" made this perfectly Stevensonian
reply: "Well, I make a living selling crockery and tinware, but my
_business_ is the propagation of truth."

This wandering idealist may serve to remind us again of the difference
between romance and romanticism. The true romance is of the spirit.
Romanticism shifts and changes with external fortunes, with altering
emotions, with the alternate play of light and shade over the vast
landscape of human experience. The typical romanticist, as we have
seen, is a man of moods. It is only a Poe who can keep the pitch
through the whole concert of experience. But the deeper romance of the
spirit is oblivious of these changes of external fortune, this rising
or falling of the emotional temperature. The moral life of America
furnishes striking illustrations of the steadfastness with which
certain moral causes have been kept, as it were, in the focus of
intense feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwavering poetry, has
transfigured such practical propaganda as the abolition of slavery, the
emancipation of woman, the fight against the liquor traffic, the
emancipation of the individual from the clutches of economic and
commercial despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
women like Julia Ward Howe, fought for these causes throughout their
lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards women was not merely
chivalric (for one may be chivalrous without any marked predisposition
to romance), but nobly romantic also. James Russell Lowell, poet as he
was, outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he
had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that
old New England of th