all conceptions of man, of society, of duty, of religion, of art, of
social institutions, of the healing art, education, and government,
and the new light which psychometric illumination throws upon all
sciences.

The literature of the future will therefore differ widely from the
literature of the past, and millions of volumes which still hold their
places on the shelves of libraries will in the next century take their
proper place in the mouldering mass which interests the antiquarian
alone,--the mouldering mass which universities still cherish, and
which helps to deaden the rising intelligence of the western world.
Let us, as Tennyson says,

"Hope the best, but hold the Present
Fatal daughter of the Past."

It is self-evident that the farther back we go for intelligence the
deeper we plunge in the darkness of ignorance; and even though
intuitional and moral truths may be found in the old writings, they
belong to a literature imbedded in an ignorance which necessarily
darkens all that comes down from such periods.

The benumbing influence of antiquity--or rather of that extended
period which may be called the Aristotelian age, the age in which all
philosophic thought was utterly benumbed by the Greek literature--has
not yet passed away. American writers are just beginning to get rid of
their absolute subserviency to foreign models in all things, and in
this partial independence they are still subservient to the
fundamental philosophic and ethical ideas of the past. The change that
is taking place is only in minor matters.

Even so graceful and able a writer as Longfellow illustrates fully the
truth of these suggestions. Mr. Charles F. Johnson, in a well-written
essay on Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, says:

"Most people feel that national temper is of slow evolution; that many
heterogeneous elements must be fused and blended here; that we too
must have a past, and that the spirit of our past must be taken up and
transmitted before a new type is realized in a new art and a new
literature. We can see that Longfellow was essentially a scholar--a
receiver of impressions from books; that he was like an AEolian harp,
blown upon by many winds, so that his music was in many regards
necessarily a melodious echo of what was 'whispered by world-wandering
winds.' And we can see, too, that he came into American literary life
just as it was passing from the germ to the plant, and that every year
he became more dist