Both Parkman and Melville looked for and found the authentic frontier. Parkman saw it at first hand on the western plains, and then went back to an eastern frontier (“mousing in the archives”) and breathed life upon it. Melville found it on the high seas, on whaling ships and on the Navy’s cruisers, and struck sparks from it, making a light for more settled folk in the eastern cities. Each one touched base with something fundamental to the American consciousness, because the frontier for many generations laid its imprint on what the American people thought and did.

Not just the physical frontier, the untamed land peopled by wild beasts and men living in the stone age. The long shadow that comes down from the American frontier—a strange shadow, half darkness and half tantalizing gleams of light—was always more a matter of the emotions and the mind than of simple geography. As much as anything, it was perhaps an attitude toward life—a state of mind, even a state of the heart, a belief that life is both plastic and perfectible, an intense and often inarticulate feeling of kinship and unity with men facing a world which they can shape as they please. As the physical frontier vanished, this feeling declined, so that the truth that was seen beyond the border came to seem a marshfire, flickering with a wholly deceptive light. We got so that we knew too much, and the fact that a good part of our knowledge was itself an illusion only compounded the trouble. Losing the frontier, we lost a source of strength.

Consider, for instance, the case of William Jennings Bryan, who had nothing whatever in common with either Parkman or Melville except that he too saw the light from the frontier and preached about it to his fellow Americans. His “enemy” was neither the illhealth of the historian nor the penury of the novelist; it was the crippling disability of a man born out of his time, speaking earnestly from a text that people have begun to ignore, accomplishing much but never quite being or doing the things he might have been and done. In the beginning he frightened the respectables and in the end he made them laugh, and the respectables may have been somewhat mistaken both times.

Bryan comes out of the shadows in a thoughtful little book, The Trumpet Soundeth , by Paul W. Glad. More a biographical essay than a biography, this book presents Bryan as a man who “was fashioned with forceful affection by the rural society in which he lived and moved and had his being”—a man from the frontier, indeed, becoming a power in American politics at a time when the frontier itself was dead but when its approach to life still had much power.

He was the perfect reflection of the middle-border region; a region, as Mr. Glad remarks, which lived by a religion of