As we study this literature, the moral greatness
of the race seems to course afresh through our veins, and our individual
strength becomes the strength of ten.
No other nation could have sung America's song of democracy:--
"Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff
that is fine."
The East and the West have vied in singing the song of a new social
democracy, in holding up as an ideal a
"... love that lives
On the errors it forgives,"
in teaching each mother to sing to her child:--
"Thou art one with the world--though I love thee the best,
And to save thee from pain, I must save all the rest.
Thou wilt weep; and thy mother must dry
The tears of the world, lest her darling should cry."
True poets, like the great physicians, minister to life by awakening faith.
The singers of New England have made us feel that the Divine Presence
stands behind the darkest shadow, that the feeble hands groping blindly in
the darkness will touch God's strengthening right hand. Amid the snows of
his Northland, Whittier wrote:--
"I know not where his islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond his love and care.
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