Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/183

172 Some misunderstanding must always take place when the observer is at cross-purposes with the soci­ety he describes. Wordsworth might have convinced himself by a moment's thought that no country could act on the imagination as America acted upon the in­stincts of the ignorant and poor, without some quality that deserved better treatment than poignant scorn; but perhaps this was only one among innumerable cases in which the unconscious poet breathed an atmosphere which the self-conscious poet could not penetrate. With equal reason he might have taken the opposite view,—that the hard, practical, money-­getting American democrat, who had neither gener­osity nor honor nor imagination, and who inhabited cold shades where fancy sickened and where genius died, was in truth living in a world of dream, and act­ing a drama more instinct with poetry than all the avatars of the East, walking in gardens of emerald and rubies, in ambition already ruling the world and guiding Nature with a kinder and wiser hand than had ever yet been felt in human history. From this point his critics never approached him,—they stopped at a stone's throw; and at the moment when they declared that the man's mind had no illusions, they added that he was a knave or a lunatic. Even on his practical and sordid side, the American might easily have been represented as a victim to illusion. If the Englishman had lived as the American specu­lator did,—in the future,—the hyperbole of enthu­siasm would have seemed less monstrous. "Look