e have
discovered that repose can be had at home, but this discovery is too
unfashionable to find favor; we have no rest except in moving about.
Looked at superficially, it seems curious that the American is, as a
rule, the only person who does not emigrate. The fact is that he can go
nowhere else where life is so uneasy, and where, consequently, he would
have so little of his sort of repose. To put him in another country would
be like putting a nineteenth-century man back into the eighteenth
century. The American wants to be at the head of the procession (as he
fancies he is), where he can hear the band play, and be the first to see
the fireworks of the new era. He thinks that he occupies an advanced
station of observation, from which his telescope can sweep the horizon
for anything new. And with some reason he thinks so; for not seldom he
takes up a foreign idea and tires of it before it is current elsewhere.
More than one great writer of England had his first popular recognition
in America. Even this season the Saturday Review is struggling with
Ibsen, while Boston, having had that disease, has probably gone on to
some other fad.

Far be it from us to praise the American for his lack of repose; it is
enough to attempt to account for it. But from the social, or rather
society, point of view, the subject has a disquieting aspect. If the
American young man and young woman get it into their heads that repose,
especially of manner, is the correct thing, they will go in for it in a
way to astonish the world. The late cultivation of idiocy by the American
dude was unique. He carried it to an extreme impossible to the youth of
any nation less "gifted." And if the American girl goes in seriously for
"repose," she will be able to give odds to any modern languidity or to
any ancient marble. If what is wanted in society is cold hauteur and
languid superciliousness or lofty immobility, we are confident that with
a little practice she can sit stiller, and look more impassive, and move
with less motion, than any other created woman. We have that confidence
in her ability and adaptability. It is a question whether it is worth
while to do this; to sacrifice the vivacity and charm native to her, and
the natural impulsiveness and generous gift of herself which belong to a
new race in a new land, which is walking always towards the sunrise.

In fine, although so much is said of the American lack of repose, is it
not best for the Americ