Sure you’re romantic about American history. What your professor left out of account was the fact that it is the most romantic of all histories. It began in myth and has developed through three centuries of fairy stones. Whatever the time is in America it is always, at every moment, the mad and wayward hour when the prince is finding the little font that alone fits into the slipper of glass. It is a little hard to know what romantic means to those who use the word umbrageousIy. But if the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or La Salle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when the Constitutional Convention ,met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger of the other side of the moon any lights or colors or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln and the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don’t know what romance is. Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by chaos out of dream, it began as dream and it has continued as dream down to the last headline you read in a newspaper, and of our dreams there are two things above all others to be said, that only madmen could have dreamed them or would have dared to—and that we have shown a considerable faculty for making them come true. The simplest truth you can ever write about our history will be charged and surcharged with romanticism, and if you are afraid of the word you had better start practicing seriously on your fiddle.