laughter.  And this point cannot be too strongly insisted on in view of the fact that nearly all our humorous writers seem impressed with the conviction that their own dignity and self-respect require them to look down upon what they portray.  But it is only little men who look down upon anything or speak down to anybody.  One sees every day how clear it is that specially fine, delicate, intellectual persons cannot portray satisfactorily coarse, common, uncultured characters.  Their attitude is at once scornful and supercilious.  The great man, like Socrates, or Dr. Johnson, or Abraham Lincoln, is just as surely coarse as he is fine, but the complaint I make with our humorists is that they are fine and not coarse in any healthful and manly sense.  A great part of the best literature and the best art is of the vital fluids, the bowels, the chest, the appetites, and is to be read and judged only through love and compassion.  Let us pray for unction, which is the marrowfat of humor, and for humility, which is the badge of manhood.

As the voice of the American has retreated from his chest to his throat and nasal passages, so there is danger that his contribution to literature will soon cease to imply any blood or viscera, or healthful carnality, or depth of human and manly affection, and will be the fruit entirely of our toploftical brilliancy and cleverness.

What I complain of is just as true of the essayists and the critics as of the novelists.  The prevailing tone here also is born of a feeling of immense superiority.  How our lofty young men, for instance, look down upon Carlyle, and administer their masterly rebukes to him!  But see how Carlyle treats Burns, or Scott, or Johnson, or Novalis, or any of his heroes.  Ay, there’s the rub; he makes heroes of them, which is not a trick of small natures.  He can say of Johnson that he was “moonstruck,” but it is from no lofty height of fancied superiority, but he uses the word as a naturalist uses a term to describe an object he loves.

What we want, and perhaps have got more of than I am ready to admit, is a race of writers who affiliate with their subjects, and enter into them through their blood, their sexuality and manliness, instead of standing apart and criticising them and writing about them through mere intellectual cleverness and “smartness.”

VII

There is a feeling in heroic poetry, or in a burst of eloquence, that I sometimes catch in quite different fields.  I caught it this morning, for instance, when I saw the belated trains go by, and knew how they had been battling with storm, darkness, and distance, and had triumphed.  They were due at my place in the night, but did not pass till after eight o’clock in the morning.  Two trains coupled together,—­the fast mail and the express,—­making an immense line of coaches hauled by two engines.  They had come from the West, and were all covered with snow