scious. The moment they made the discovery that they could see the universe with their own eyes, they ceased to be provincial. “He despises me,” wrote Ben Jonson, “because I live in an alley. Tell him his soul lives in an alley.” After all, narrowness or enlargement are in the mind. Mr. Henry James, turning on Thoreau the reverse end of a remarkably good telescope, pronounces him “parochial,” because he made the woods and waters of Concord, Massachusetts, his chief theme. The epithet is curiously infelicitous. To be parochial is to turn away from the great and look at the little; the daily newspapers of Paris afford the best illustration of this fault. It is not parochial, but the contrary, when Dr. Gould spends his life in watching the stars from his lonely observatory in Paraguay; or when Lafarge erects his isolated studio among the Paradise Rocks near Newport; or when Thoreau studies birds and bees, Iliads and Vedas, in his little cottage by Lake Walden. To look out of the little world into the great, that is enlargement; all else is parochialism.
It is also to be remembered that people in America, in those days, if they had access to no great variety of thought, still had — as in the Indian’s repartee about Time — all the thought there was. The sources of intellectual influence then most powerful in England, France, and Germany, were accessible and potent in America also. The writers who were then remoulding English intellectual habits — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shel-
