But this is not all.  An awful shadow accompanies the brilliant day of your genius.  That dark humor of yours, that woful demon from whose companionship, by the law of your existence, you cannot be free, tolls funeral-bells and chants the dirges of death in your ears forever.  What your faith does not take with warmth to its bosom it must spurn violently away; where you cannot hope strongly, you must vehemently despair; what your genius does not illumine to your heart it must bury as in shadows of eternal night.  It being, therefore, of the nature of your mind to shine powerfully on the eminences of mankind, it became in consequence no less its nature to call up over the broad levels a black fog that even its own eye could not penetrate.  Thus with you, if I understand you rightly, the common and the fateful are nearly one and the same; the Good is to you an exceptional energy which struggles up from the level forces of the universe.  Is not your conception of human existence nearly this:  a perpetual waste deluge, and here and there some Noah in his ark above it?

There is noble truth to be seen from this point of view,—­truth to which America also will have to attend.  But being intensely limited to this sole point of view, you are utterly without eye for the whole significance of our national life.  You are not only at the opposite pole from us, but your whole heart and intelligence are included in the currents of that polaric opposition.

Still further.  I think, that, having made out its scheme of thought, your mind soon contracts a positive demand even for the evil conditions which, in your estimation, made that scheme necessary.  To illustrate.  A man is roused at night, and sent flying for a physician in some sudden and terrible emergency.  He returns, broken-winded, to learn that it was altogether a false alarm.  It is quite possible that his first emotion, on receiving this intelligence, will not be pleasure, but indignation; he may feel that somebody ought to be sick, since he has been at such pains.  Pardon me, if I think your position not wholly dissimilar.  It seems to me to have become an imperative requisition of your mind that nine-tenths of mankind should be fools.  They must be so; else you have no place for them in your system, and know not what to do with them.  As fools, you have full arrangements made for their accommodation.  Some hero, some born ruler of men, is to come forth (out of your books) and reduce them to obedience, and lord it over them in a most useful manner.  But if they will not be fools, if they contumaciously refuse to be fools, they disturb the necessary conditions of kingship, and, of course, deserve much reprobation.  I do not, therefore, feel myself unjust to you in saying, that, the better the American people behave, in consistency with their political traditions and customary modes of thought, the less you are able to be pleased with them.  If they demean themselves as fools and incapables, (as they sometimes do,) they bring grist to your mill; but if they show wisdom, courage, and constancy, they leave you to stand at your mill-doors and grumble for want of toll,—­as in the nutshell-epic aforesaid.