To him the country of the American writers became
almost as well known as his own. One thing alone he could not read.
When he came to the War of Independence, he closed the book and
ordered his theatre to vanish. And, to this day, the events of that
war are only partly known to him. No boy who is jealous for his
country will read, except upon compulsion, the story of a war which
was begun in stupidity, carried on with incompetence, and concluded
with humiliation.
The attack on Panama, the beginning of the Colonies, the exiles for
religion, the long struggle with the French, the driving back of the
Indians: it was a very fine drama--the Romance of America--in ever so
many acts, and twice as many tableaux, that this boy saw. And always
on the stage, now like Drake, now like Raleigh, now like Miles
Standish, now like Captain John Smith, he saw a young Englishman,
performing prodigies of valour and bearing a charmed life. Yet, do not
think that it was a play with nothing but fighting in it. There were
the Dutch burghers of New Amsterdam, under Walter the Doubter, or the
renowned Peter Stuyvesant; there was Rip Van Winkle on the Catskill
Mountains; there were the king-killers, hiding in the rocks beside
Newhaven; there were the witch trials of Salem; there was the peaceful
village of Concord, from which came voices that echoed round and round
the world; there was the Lake, lying still and silent, ringed by its
woods, where the solitary student of Nature loved to sit and watch and
meditate.
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