hieved, will mark an epoch
in the world's history. Nowhere, at least in modern times, have thought
and action approached so nearly and intimately as in America; nowhere
is speculative intellect so  with the hues of practical interest
without limiting its own flight; nowhere are labor and executive power
so receptive of pure intellectual suggestion. The union of what is
deepest and most recondite in thought with clear-sighted sagacity has
been well hit by Lowell in his description of the typical American
scholar,--

  "Sits in a mystery calm and intense,
  And looks round about him with sharp common-sense."

That is, the New Man has two things that seldom make each other's
acquaintance,--Sight and Insight. Accordingly, our subtilest thinker,
whom the scholarly Mr. Vaughan classes with the mystics and accuses of
going beyond the legitimate range even of mystics, has written such an
estimate of the most practical nation in the world as has never been
written of that or any other before. The American knows what is about
him, has tact, sagacity, conversance with surfaces and circumstances,
is the shrewdest guesser in the world; and seeing him on this side
alone, one might say,--This is the man of to-day, a quick worker, good
to sail ships, bore mountains, buy and sell, but belonging to the
surface, knowing only that. The medal turns, and lo! here is this 'cute
Yankee a thinker, a mystic, fellow of the antique, Oriental in his
subtilest contemplations, a rider of the sunbeam, dwelling upon Truth's
sweetness with such pure devotion and delight that vigorous Mr.
Kingsley must shriek, "Windrush!" "Intellectual Epicurism!" and disturb
himself in a somewhat diverting manner. Pollok declaimed against the
attempt to lay hold of the earth with one hand and heaven with the
other. But that is the peculiar feat for which the American is
born,--to bring together seeing and doing, principle and practice,
eternity and to-day. The American is given, they say, to extremes.
True, but to _both_ extremes; he belongs to the two antipodes.