England, the same generalization broadly holds good. The incomparable
Hawthorne, whatever his psychological sympathy with the Puritan past,
wrought inevitably by his art for the loosening of its intellectual
hold; Poe, though he did not venture till his days of downfall to write
his Eureka, thereby proves himself an entirely non-Christian theist;
and Emerson's poetry, no less than his prose, constantly expresses
his pantheism; while his gifted disciple Thoreau, in some ways a
more stringent thinker than his master, was either a pantheist or a
Lucretian theist, standing aloof from all churches. [1867] The economic
conditions of American life have till recently been unfavourable to
the higher literature, as apart from fiction; but the unique figure
of Walt Whitman stands for a thoroughly naturalistic view of life;
[1868] Mr. Howells appears to be at most a theist; Mr. Henry James
has not even exhibited the bias of his gifted brother to the theism
of their no less gifted father; and some of the most esteemed men
of letters since the Civil War, as Dr. Wendell Holmes and Colonel
Wentworth Higginson, have been avowedly on the side of rationalism,
or, as the term goes in the States, "liberalism." Though the tone of
ordinary conversation is more often reminiscent of religion in the
United States than in England, the novel and the newspaper have been
perhaps more thoroughly secularized there than here; and in the public
honour done to so thorough a rationalist as the late Dr. Moncure Conway
at the hands of his alma mater, the Dickinson College, West Virginia,
may be seen the proof that the official orthodoxy of his youth has
disappeared from the region of his birth.