Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[124] regard with hearty admiration, and I can add with personal affection, since he has been my guest and I have been his—Mr. Bryce has a chapter on ‘Creative Intellectual Power,’ in which he has some capital remarks on the impossibility of saying why great men appear in one time or place and not in another—in Florence, for instance, and not in Naples or Milan. Then he goes on to say that there is ‘no reason why the absence of brilliant genius among the sixty millions in the United States should excite any surprise,’ and adds soon after, ‘It is not to be made a reproach against America that men like Tennyson or Darwin have not been born there.’ Surely not; nor is it a reproach against England that men like Emerson or Hawthorne have not been born there. But if this last is true, why did it not occur to Mr. Bryce to say it; and had he said it, is it not plain that the whole tone and statement of his proposition would have been different? It occurs to him to specify Darwin and Tennyson, but the two men who above all others represent creative intellectual power, up to this time, in America, are not so much as named in his whole chapter of thirteen pages.