his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep itself alive, though he
never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job turns out to be a great
poet as soon as his flocks and herds are taken away from him.

There is no reason why our continent should not sing as well as the
rest. We have had the practical forced upon us by our position. We have
had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. And we are
descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright
wrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the
Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should
be the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, or
they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are
States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California.

But there seems to be another reason why we should not become a poetical
people. Formerly the poet embodied the hopes and desires of men in
visible types. He gave them the shoes of swiftness, the cap of
invisibility and the purse of Fortunatus. These were once stories for
grown men, and not for the nursery as now. We are apt ignorantly to
wonder how our forefathers could find satisfaction in fiction the
absurdity of which any of our primary-school children could demonstrate.
But we forget that the world's gray fathers were children themselves,
and that in their little world, with its circle of the black unknown all
about it, the imagination was as active as it is with people in the
dark. Look at a child's toys, and we shall understand the matter well
enough. Imagination is the fairy godmother (every child has one still),
at the wave of whose wand sticks become heroes, the closet in which she
has been shut fifty times for being naughty is turned into a palace, and
a bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur.