Europe has been loved with a blood love. That has made it beautiful.
In America, you have Fenimore Cooper's beautiful landscape: but that is wish-fulfilment, done from a distance. And you have Thoreau in Concord. But Thoreau sort of isolated his own bit of locality and put it under a lens, to examine it. He almost anatomized it, with his admiration.
America isn't a blood-home-land. For every American, the blood-home-land is Europe. The spirit home-land is America.
Transcendentalism. Transcend this home-land business, exalt the idea of These States till you have made it a universal idea, says the true American. The oversoul is a world-soul, not a local thing.
So, in the next great move of imaginative conquest, Americans turned to the sea. Not to the land. Earth is too specific, too particular. Besides, the blood of white men is wine of no American soil. No, no.
But the blood of all men is ocean-born. We have our material universality, our blood-oneness, in the sea. The salt water.
You can't idealize the soil. But you've got to try. And trying, you reap a great imaginative reward. And the greatest reward is failure. To know you have failed, that you must fail. That is the greatest comfort of all, at last.
Tolstoi failed with the soil: Thomas Hardy too: and Giovanni Verga; the three greatest.
The further extreme, the greatest mother, is the sea. Love the great mother of the sea, the Magna Mater. And see how bitter it is. And see how you must fail to win her to your ideal: forever fail. Absolutely fail.
Swinburne tried in England. But the Americans made the greatest trial. The most vivid failure.