Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[48] of fulfilment in our older American States —and every bright boy or girl has a literary Louvre and Vatican at command. Given a taste for literature and there are at hand all the masters of the art—Plato and Homer, Cicero and Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Travel is still needed, but not for books—only for other forms of art, for variety of acquaintanceship, and for the habit of dealing with men and women of many nationalities. The most fastidious American in Europe should not look with shame, but with pride and hope, upon those throngs of his fellow-countrymen whom he sees crowding the art-galleries of Europe, looking about them as ignorantly, if you please, as the German barbarians when they entered Rome. It is not so hard to gain culture; the thing almost impossible to obtain, unless it be born in us, is the spirit of initiative, of self-confidence. That is the gift with which great nations begin; we now owe our chief knowledge of Roman literature and art to the descendants of those Northern barbarians.

And it must be kept in view, finally, that a cosmopolitan tribunal is at best but a court of