flashes and explosions of overwhelming importance. Another explanation is that its people have been too occupied in opening territory to settlement and development to expend much energy on recording and explaining the course of events, much less the participation in the struggle where the overscrupulous were doomed to defeat. A third would say that a democracy is against good history, for it means a slow vulgarizing of the best. No such explanations will account for the absence of those willing and able to relate their own careers after their own point of view. Their names should be legion. The foreign visitor, in the rawest period of our growth, has not failed in picturesque, even lurid contrast, and has not found us inarticulate on ourselves or bashful of suggesting our merits. If the tone has been one of bluster rather than of philosophic analysis, it is genuine and not assumed, even to the wincing at the reflection returned by the not too faultless mirror.
In colonial New England publicity in the religious experiences of members or would-be members of the churches was exacted. If printed they take rank with the confessions' of condemned criminals just reprieved, interesting not for their content, but for the state of mind and surroundings they show. They constitute a necessary item in the social history of the time, a crude form of the third degree, by which it was hoped a corner of the curtain of the soul, the token of immortal man, would be raised. The diaries, chiefly kept in interleaved almanacs by the ministers, were never intended for the public eye, and rarely rise above the level of a record of church ministration, with items of farm and household of a singularly bald nature. Once in a great while some one has the itch of putting all his thoughts and feelings on paper, and in seeking to imitate St. Augustine in frankness and scope, presents the most repellent features of religious ecstaticism. Sainthood and martyrdom are able to endure that form of exhibition; but the atmosphere of early New England lacks in the quality which makes martyrdom picturesque; and this self-immolation to dogma long since passed away leaves the reader cold, even in a critical frame of mind. Did the situation of soul really demand this suffering? Is it not the symptom of physical derangement so easily mistaken for a divine afflatus? Of the sincerity of the sufferer there need be no doubt; but for permanent effect the acting is a little overdone.
Whence comes this expansiveness which often mounts to the grotesque; this tendency to publicity of thought and action? It is not English, for that people avoid exhibitions of feeling lest they make themselves ridiculous. It is not French, for they have a better
