The American Scholar

I found most of the reading to be difficult. After rereading passages it seemed to make more sense. But I kept rereading one passage that i couldn't seem to understand. It was the following text
              "Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness,--"Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born in,-- is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."


I think this confused me by the way he was talking about fear. He was describing evil and fear of the people. It seemed like a dark atmosphere that he was describing but then at the end he said it was a very good era. I wasn't sure why he would say that an evil and scary era is a good one. But then when I read the last part of the sentence when it said " if we know but what to do with it." was very interesting. He made it seem as if we knew what ti do with evil it would make it good. But that confused me as well.