nplaceness of the
world rests like a fog upon the mind and heart. No one goes to his
day's work and comes home again without a consciousness of contact with
an unspiritual atmosphere, or incompletely spiritualized forces, not
merely with indifference, to what Emerson would term "the over-soul,"
but with a lack of any faith in the things which are unseen. Take those
very forces which have limited the influence of Emerson throughout the
United States; they illustrate the universal forces which clip the
wings of romance. The obstacles in the path of Emerson's influence are
not merely the religious and denominational differences which Dr.
George A. Gordon portrayed in a notable article at the time of the
Emerson Centenary. The real obstacles are more serious. It is true
that Dr. Park of Andover, Dr. Bushnell of Hartford, and Dr. Hodge of
Princeton, could say in Emerson's lifetime: "We know a better, a more
Scriptural and certificated road toward the very things which Emerson
is seeking for. We do not grant that we are less idealistic than he. We
think him a dangerous guide, following wandering fires. It is better to
journey safely with us."

But I have known at least two livery-stable keepers and many college
professors who would unite in saying: "Hodge and Park and Bushnell and
Emerson are all following after something that does not exist. One is
not much more mistaken than the others. We can get along perfectly well
in our business without any of those ideas at all. Let us stick to the
milk in the pan, the horse in the stall, the documents which you will
find in the library."

There exists, in other words, in all classes of American society
to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the
transcendental movement, or the Civil War, an immense mass of
unspiritualized, unvitalized American manhood and womanhood. No
literature comes from it and no religion, though there is much human
kindness, much material progress, and some indestructible residuum of
that idealism which lifts man above the brute.

Yet the curious and the endlessly fascinating thing about these forces
of reaction is that they themselves shift and change. We have seen that
external romance depending upon strangeness of scene, novelty of
adventure, rich atmospheric distance of space or time, disappears with
the changes of civilization. The farm expands over the wolf's den, the
Indian becomes a blacksmith, but do the gross and material instinc