England

with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or itscathedral;with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—thecriterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equalshores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness hasbeen

extracted; and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest ofmodified illusions:and France, the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly” inwhose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what wasoriginally one’sobject—substance at the core: and the East with its snails, itsemotional

shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and itsimperturbability,all of museum quality: and America where thereis the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars aresmoked on thestreet in the north; where there are no proof readers, nosilkworms, no digressions;

the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-lesscountry—in which letters are writtennot in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthandbut in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The letter “a”in psalm and calm whenpronounced with the sound of “a” in candle, is very noticeablebut

why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for bythefact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstoolswhich resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the case ofmettlesomeness which may bemistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, nocon-

clusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter, is to haveconfessedthat one has not looked far enough. The sublimated wisdomof China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotioncompressedin the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who isable

to say, “I envy nobody but him and him only, who catches more fishthanI do,”—the flower and fruit of all that noted superi-ority—should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must oneimaginethat it is not there? It has never been confined to onelocality.