Note 85 — JOURNAL. (continued 6)

The love of the sublime and beautiful, those aspirations after something more refined, more exalted and perfect, than this world affords, in short, that spiritual propensity classed in its many and various manifestations by the phrenologists under the title of ideality, will have some vent, and, under circumstances most adverse to its existence, will creep out at some channel or another, and vindicate human nature by flourishing in some shape over the narrowest, homeliest, lowliest, and least favourable guise it may put on. Certainly America is nothe country of large idealities,—it is the very reverse; if I may create a bump, it is the country of large realities, i. e. large acquisitiveness, large causality, large caution, and small veneration and wonder. Nathless some ideality must needs be, and is, and it creeps out in Christian names. I have heard sempstresses called Amanda and Emmeline, and we had a housemaid in New England called Cynthia. Our village carpenter is named Rudolph; and if the spirit of the people appears to me unimaginative and unpoetical, I take great comfort in their fine names.