New Spirit Author:Havelock Ellis Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WHITMAN. I. If we put aside imaginative writers—Hawthorne, Poe, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain—America has produced three men of world-wide significance.1 These ... more »three belong to the same corner of the continent; they form a culminating series, and at the same time they complement each other. It is difficult ot consider one of them without throwing a glance at the others. Enjerson comes first. In Emerson, after two hundred years, Puritanism seems, for the first time, to have found voice. The men of Banbury and Amsterdam were too much distracted by the outer world to succeed in finding adequate artistic expression for the joys that satisfied them and the spirit that so powerfully moved them. They have been the sport of their enemies, and have come down to us in literature as a set of sour fanatics. It was not until the seed was carried over sea, to germinate slowly and peace- 1 The significance of Lowell, a great writer unquestionably, seems to be chiefly national. fully in New England, that at length it broke into flower, and that we know clearly that union of robust freedom and mystic exaltation which lies at the heart of Puritanism. In his calm and aus- tere manner—born of the blood that had passed through the veins of six generations of Puritan ministers—Emerson overturned the whole of tradition. " A world in the hand," he said, with (/ cheery, genial scepticism, " is worth two in the ' bush." With gentle composure, with serene hilarity, perhaps with an allusion to the roses that " make no mention of former roses," he posited the absolute right of the individual to adjudicate in religion, in marriage, in the State. Even he himself, while able, like Spinoza and Goethe, to live by self-regulating laws that are death to men of less sanity, could not always in his peaceful h...« less