New Man is comparatively delicate and fragile ; but as a china, vase is not necessarily less sound than a stone jug or iron kettle, so delicacy and fragility in man are no proof of disease. The ominous prognosis of this doctor, therefore, seems no occasion for despair, perhaps not even for alarm. But to perceive what different harping can be performed on this string, hear Carus:—"Leanness, as such," says the master," is the symbol of a certain lightness, activity, rapidity, and mental power." Thus the adipose impoverishment, which to the yellow-eyed Englishman seems utter bankruptey, is at once recognized by a superior man as denoting an augmentation, rather than diminution, of proper human wealth.
But while the typical American organization is of this admitted delicacy and lightness, it is still capable, under high and powerful impulse, of extraordinary feats of endurance. This has of late been admirably illustrated. Not long since, there returned to our shores a hero who—as Dante was believed by the people of Italy to have entered the Inferno of Fire—had actually descended into the opposite. Inferno of Frost, and done unprecedented battle with the demons of that realm. Dr. Kane was slight, delicately framed, lean, with sharp, clear-cut features, of quivering mobility and fineness of texture, having the aspect rather of an artist than an explorer,—not at all the personage to whom most judges would assign great power of endurance. And as one follows him through those thrice Herculean toils,—secs him not only bearing cheerfully the great burden of his own cares and ills, but lifting up, as It were, from his companions, and assuming upon his own shoulders, the awful oppression of the polar night, as Atlas of old was fabled to support the heavens,—not even one’s admiration at such force of soul can wholly exclude wonder at such fortitude of body. Whence, we ask, this power of endurance? We can trace it to no ordinary physical resource. It comes from no ordinary physical resource. It is pure brain-power. It streams down upon the body, in rivers of invigoration, from the cerebral hemispheres. A conversational philosopher, discoursing to a circle of intelligent New England mechanics, said,-—"It is commonly supposed that the earth supports man. Not so; man upholds the earth!" "How!" exclaimed a wide-eyed auditor; "upholds the earth? How do you make that out ?" "How?" answered the philosopher, with superb innocence,—"don’t you see that it sticks to his heels?" When the question is asked, How the slight frame of this Arctic hero could support such tests, the answer must be analogous,—It clung to his brain. The usual order of support is reversed; and here is that truer Mercury, in whom the winged head, possessing as function what its prototype only exhibited as ornament and symbol, really soars in its own might, bearing the pendent feet. Dr. Kane was one of the purest examples of the American organization; and as he issued victorious from that region where "the ground burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire," the Man of the New World was represented, and in him came forth with proven strength. The same significance would not attach to all feats of endurance, even where equally representative. Here are Hercules and Orpheus in one,—the organization of a poet, and the physical stamina of a gladiator.
Now this peculiar organization offers the physical inducement for two great tendencies,—one relating to the perception of truth, the other to the feeling of social claims,—while these tendencies are supported on the spiritual side by the great disciplines of our position ; and the genius which these foreshow is precisely that which ought to be the genius of the New Man.
This organization is that of the seer, the poet, the spiritualist, of all such as have an eye for the deeper essences and first principles of things. Concede intellectual power, or the spiritual element, then add this temperament, and there follows a certain subtile, penetrative, radical quality of thought, a characteristic
