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[46]
from America was only a shade more humiliating than the reverential attention visible in the American press when Matthew Arnold was kind enough to stand on tiptoe upon our lecture-platform and apply his little measuring-tape to the great shade of Emerson.
I should like to see in our literature some of the honest self-assertion shown by Senator Tracy of Litchfield, Connecticut, during Washington's administration, in his reply to the British Minister's praises of Mrs. Oliver Wolcott's beauty.
‘Your countrywoman,’ said the Englishman, ‘would be admired at the Court of St. James.’ —‘Sir,’ said Tracy, ‘she is admired even on Litchfield Hill.’
In that recent book of aphorisms which has given a fresh impulse to the fading fame of Dr. Channing, he points out that the hope of the world lies in the fact that parents can not make of their children what they will.
It is equally true of parent nations.
How easily we accept the little illusions offered us by our elders in the world's literature, almost forgetting that two and two make four, in the innocent delight with which they inspire us!
In re-reading Scott's
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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