hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of England." Whether Americans would ever manage to wake this sleeping beauty depended, however, on whether they took up Emerson's challenge to live on a "higher plane," with ardor, intensity, devotion, and imagination. The course of public events, in the closing decades of Emerson's life, was not encouraging. American idealism appeared to have exhausted itself in the war against slavery. Slavery's legacy of racial antagonism confronted the nation with injustices more mountainous even than slavery itself, to the removal of which, however, it almost immediately proved unequal. Instead of accepting the social obligations implicit in emancipation, Northerners turned the freedmen over to their former masters and threw themselves instead, with a single-minded fanaticism unprecedented in the nation's history, into the business of getting rich. The energies released by the Civil War proved almost wholly commercial and rapacious—the old Yankee shrewdness without its Puritan scruples or even the rustic simplicity that once served as a partial check on the appetite for wealth.

More than ever, the cultivated classes looked to Europe not only for their literary standards but for their standard of the scale of expenditure appropriate to genteel pretensions. The man of affairs was now expected to cut a stylish figure, to make annual trips to Europe with his family, to launch his daughters in "society" with the proper ceremony and expense, to equip his sons for learned professions by educating them abroad, to dress his wife in the height of fashion, to maintain several handsome residences, to give lavish dinners and balls, to surround himself with a large staff of servants, to patronize the arts, to endow churches and universities, to pay for elaborate investigations into the plight of the poor (whose numbers seemed to multiply exponentially, far beyond the remedial capacities of "Christian charity"), and to make generous contributions to the political parties that kept a semblance of public order.

The Yankee ideal of plain living and high thinking had no more attraction for Americans in the Gilded Age than the antebellum appeal for an indigenous national literature. The editors of the Nation (the voice of disillusioned abolition), commenting in 1868 on the demand for a "literature truly American," confessed, "We do not know just what is meant by these words so often heard." If the words referred to works in praise of provincial "Yankeehood," or again to the sprawling, ungainly poetry of Walt Whitman (which Emerson, incidentally, had been one of the first to

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