erer on the rocks of Brittany.

We must remember that we are endeavoring to measure great spaces and to
take account of the "amplitude of time." The individual "fact-man," as
Coleridge called him, remains perhaps a fact-man to the end, just as
the dreamer may remain a dreamer. But no single generation is
compounded all of fact or all of dream. Longfellow felt, no doubt, that
there was an ideal United States, which Dickens did not discover
during that first visit of 1842; he would have set the Cambridge which
he knew over against the Cincinnati viewed by Mrs. Trollope; he would
have asserted that the homes characterized by refinement, by
cultivation, by pure and simple sentiment, made up the true America.
But even among Longfellow's own contemporaries there was Whitman, who
felt that the true America was something very different from that
exquisitely tempered ideal of Longfellow. There was Thoreau, who, over
in Concord, had been pushing forward the frontier of the mind and
senses, who had opened his back-yard gate, as it were, upon the
boundless and mysterious territory of Nature. There was Emerson, who
was preaching an intellectual independence of the Old World which
should correspond to the political and social independence of the
Western Hemisphere. There was Parkman, whose hatred of philanthropy,
whose lack of spirituality, is a striking illustration of the rebound
of New England idealism against itself, of the reaction into stoicism.
What different worlds these men lived in, and yet they were all
inhabitants, so to speak, of the same parish; most of them met often
around the same table! The lesson of their variety of experience and
differences of gifts as workmen in that great palace of literature
which is so variously built, is that no action and reaction in the
imaginative world is ever final. Least of all do these actions and
reactions affect the fortunes of true romance. The born dreamer may
fall from one dream into another, but he still murmurs, in the famous
line of William Ellery Channing,--

"If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea."

No line in our literature is more truly American,--unless it be that
other splendid metaphor, by David Wasson, which says the same thing in
other words:--

"Life's gift outruns my fancies far,
And drowns the dream
In larger stream,
As morning drinks the morning-star."

V

Humor and Satire

A distinguished professor in the Harvard Di