Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

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[383] with Philadelphia, then changing to New York, then to Boston, and again reverting, in some degree, to New York. I say “in some degree” because Washington has long been the political centre of the nation, and tends more and more to occupy the same central position in respect to science, at least; while Western cities, notably Chicago and San Francisco, tend steadily to become literary centres for the wide regions they represent. Meanwhile the vast activities of journalism, the readiness of communication everywhere, the detached position of colleges, with many other influences, decentralize literature more and more. Emerson used to say that Europe stretched to the Alleghanies, but this at least has been corrected, and the national spirit is coming to claim the whole continent for its own.

There is undoubtedly a tendency in the United States to transfer intellectual allegiance, for a time, to science rather than to literature. This may be only a swing of the pendulum; but its temporary influence has nowhere been better defined or characterized than by the late Clarence King, formerly director of the United States Geological Survey, who wrote thus a little before his death: “With all its novel modern powers and practical sense, I am forced to admit that the purely scientific brain is miserably ”