"Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
… rich apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes."
No other literature has so forcibly expressed such an inspiring belief in individuality, the aim to have each human being realize that this plastic world expects to find in him an individual hero. Emerson emphasized "the new importance given to the single person." No philosophy of individuality could be more explicit than Walt Whitman's:—
"The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual,—namely to You."
This emphasis on individuality is an added incentive to try "to yield that particular fruit which each was created to bear." We feel that the universe is our property and that we shall not stop until we have a clear title to that part which we desire. As we study this literature, the moral greatness of the race seems to course afresh through our veins, and our individual strength becomes the strength of ten.
No other nation could have sung America's song of democracy:—
"Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff
that is fine."
The East and the West have vied in singing the song of a new social democracy, in holding up as an ideal a
"… love that lives
On the errors it forgives,"
in teaching each mother to sing to her child:—
"Thou art one with the world—though I love thee the best,
And to save thee from pain, I must save all the rest.
Thou wilt weep; and thy mother must dry
The tears of the world, lest her darling should cry."