IN 1630, there was seen in the harbor of Delft, in Holland, a littlo vessel of poor appearance and meanly equipped. It was called the May Flower. It was anchored in the harbor, waiting for its cargo and its passengers, the former very trifling, the latter a knot of poor enough fellows.

The May-Flower sailed, carrying with her a dozen English Puritans, for the most part old, weary, mournful, in threadbare black coats, and fortified with their Calvinist Bibles, a provision of biscuit, and more or less ham. When they had crossed the Atlantic, these worthy people, who were seeking a peaccable spot where they might worship God in their own fashion, set to work to found colonies, which became Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. They had, as you know, to

fight against much hardship. When their dust was mingled with the soil of America, there issued from it a magnificent Empire.

They had brought with them something more powerful than credit, riches, or armies, they possessed Moral Force; they were depositories of that sacred spark from which empires. are created; they had sincerity, belief, perseverance, courage. There is nothing to show that they were very clever or even well instructed; they certainly expected no great fortune, but their souls were strong. Suppose in their place, brave gentlemen of France or Spain, the most courtly lords of the Court. of Charles I. or of Charles II.; they would not have held up three years against the savages, the bears and the ennui of tho solitude. American society would not have been founded. Our Puritans believed; they knew how to wait, fight, suffer, and these are great qualities.

Half a century later, Bayle sought an asylum in another city of that same Holland, refuge and workshop of revolu tionary intellects during two hundred years. Baylo was certainly one of the rarest minds that can be cited, and if we were in search of a man to oppose to our Puritans, we could not find a better one.

He lodged near the statue of Erasmus, and when, at night, he illumed his lamp, its sceptic light fell upon the bronze robe of his sceptic precursor. He was, throughout the whole of his laborious life, more brilliant, more active, more influential, than Erasmus himself.

Yet after all, in what did ho succeed? in furnishing Voltaire and Diderot with excellent epigrams. The Puritans had done better; they had deposed in the soil of America, the germ of a colossal empire. The power of faith and courage, even with genius, is in fecundity and grandeur, singularly greater than cleverness. Bayle, the charming thinker, "the

Story-teller of the Universe," as M. Villemain paints him with one profound and ingenious touch, gave to the 18th century an immense arsenal of arguments, facts, doubts, and railleries he has, in playing with it, sapped certainty and destroyed credulity and glory. That is all. I would not sacrifice to courageous souls all independence and spiritual grace; but I say that the one builds, where the other destroys. I say that Moral Force is essential to the creation, maintenance and greatness of society.

Now this Moral Force existed in its highest degree in the little Puritan colony carried by the May Flower. Its true originality was neither chivalric grace nor intellectual brilliancy. The colonists had only that Calvinist energy, that vigorous courage, about to struggle with nature, that force which the author of Robinson Crusoe, the old Puritan, Daniel Defoe, has dressed in epic robes. Profound reverie, highly colored fiction, tragic starts, refined metaphysics, clever style. harmonious choice of language, none of all these could suit these colonists; savage in their austerity, cruel by force of virtue, Art could not live in the hardness of their souls.

It was not until late, after the first efforts at colonization, when the red men had been forced to retire into their woods, when a considerable strip of land had been cleared upon the borders of the Atlantic, that a sort of literature was born in America.

Feeble, timid, imitative, with no pretension to sublimity or passion, a stranger to greatness, half rustic, half citizer, was it-in a word, it was inspired by the Spectator and Robinson Crusoe.

The beginner of this literature, amiable and subtle scholar of Defoe and Addison, was Benjamin Franklin. He announced the advent of a milder and more indulgent civiliza

tion, Addison's apologue and delicacy; the popular, plainspeaking of Defoe and Bunyan, were softened and melted into a pleasant composition, which characterised the first essays of colonial literature, essays remarkable for the sobriety of their tone, and the absence of high color.

Imagination, magnificent and dangerous gift, is not found in the works of Franklin, nor do any of his cotemporaries or friends possess it. Nor Washington, nor Jefferson, nor Gouverneur Morris, nor John Quincy Adams. Only to-day some sparks from its prism are thrown upon the pages of Prescott and Longfellow, of Washington Irving and Cooper.

What is the cause of this intellectual phenomenon? In view of those green savannalis, those virgin forests, those lakes which are seas, those rivers whose banks are too far apart to be seen, the manly virtues of the Puritans have grown; but their imagination has rested mute. Problem of curious resolution.

SECTION II.

WHAT IS IMAGINATION ?—THE UNITED STATES WANT HIS

TORICAL PERSPECTIVE, NOT GREATNESS.

What is imagination? It is remembrance idealized.

Of all the striking images evoked by the mind of man there is but one which does not emanate from the memory. Unite the forms of the man and the horse, of the fish and the woman, of the goat and the youth, and you create the Centaur, the Syren, the Faun. Submit yourself to the laws of Nature, and if there be any harmony or proportion in your new combination, your chimera will be the fruit of a happy

imagination. If your remembrances, badly united, clumsily adjusted, do not succeed in composing a whole, you give birth to monsters. In either hypothesis, the common source from whence you draw is the Memory. Endowed with a more or less vivid or ardent power of remembrance, you will have what is vulgarly called fecundity or sterility of imagination ; but in your books, pictures, songs, poems, statues, what you fancy that you invent-though you were Dante, Phidias, or Raphael-will always be an impression of your childhood or youth, something which you have scen or felt; treasure of remembrance whoso poverty constitutes what is called stupidity, whose confusion results in extravagance, whose riches and plenitudo constitute Genius.

One abuses the elasticity of language, when one speaks of creative intelligences; for there is no creation: to reproduce, to imitate, is enough for us. If Homer, Cervantes, Ariosto, Byron had lived, shut up in a dungeon, what would they ever have imagined? What creation would they have given to the world? Their empty brain, their inert thought would have produced but mean or gross ideas, such as belong to hunger, thirst, the material wants of man. But they led lives of agitation; a thousand varied impressions were profoundly engraved upon their minds which were endowed by Nature with a great aptitude to receive such impressions. Dante had seen Florence; he created a Hell: Theologian, he created the Paradise: Lover, he produced Beatrice. Was it wanting in him, that quality falsely desiguated, but which must be called by its vulgar name, Imagination; to him who has not introduced into his "Comedy" celestial, infernal or expiatory, one single word which was not a remembrance, one single idea which was not taken from Nature or IIistory?

The critics, born in such days as ours, only talk of creation, invention, imagination. It is precisely when all images