partnership. Merit and reward do not hunt in couples. If the Tycoon
should send a deputation requesting me to come over at once and settle
matters between himself and his Daimios, I should simply tell him that I
had not the time, but I should not be surprised.)

But if we only did reverence England as once we reverenced her, this is
what I would say:--"Upon my country do not visit my sins. Upon my
country's fame let me fasten no blot. Wherever I am wrong, inelegant,
inaccurate, provincial, visit all your reprobation upon me,--

'Me, me: adsum, qui feci; in me convertite ferrum,
O Angli! mea fraus omnis,'--

upon me as a writer, not upon me as an American. Do not regard me as the
exponent of American culture, or as anywhere near the high-water mark of
American letters. I am not one of the select few, but of the promiscuous
many. Born and bred in a farm-yard, and pattering about among the hens
and geese and calves and lambs when other children were learning to talk
like gentlemen and scholars, what can you expect of me? It is a wonder
that I am as tolerable as I am. It is a sign of the greatness of my
country, that I, who, if I lived in England, should be scattering my
_h_-s in wild confusion, and asking whether Americans were black or
copper-colored, am able in this land of free schools and equal rights to
straighten out my verbs and keep my nouns intact. If you will see the
highest, look on the heights. If you look at me, look at me where I am:
not among those whose infancy was cradled in leisure and luxury, whose
life from the beginning has been carefully attuned to the finest issues,
who for purity of language and dignity of mental bearing may throw down
the gauntlet to the proudest nation in the world,--but among those
children of the soil who take its color, who share its qualities, who
give out its fragrance, who love it and lay their hearts to it and grow
with it, rocky and rugged, yet cherish, it may be hoped, its little
dimples of verdure here and there,--who show not what, with closest
cultivation, it might become, but what, under the broad skies and the
free winds and the common dews and showers, it is. Our conservatories
can boast hues as gorgeous, forms as stately, texture as fine as yours;
but don't look for camellias in a cornfield."

Does this seem a little inconsistent with what I was saying just now to
my homemade critics? Very likely. But truth is many-sided, and one side
you may present at