like a stray dog.

Sec. 2

In studying the anatomy and physiology of American Puritanism, and its
effects upon the national literature, one quickly discerns two main
streams of influence. On the one hand, there is the influence of the
original Puritans--whether of New England or of the South--, who came to
the New World with a ready-made philosophy of the utmost clarity,
positiveness and inclusiveness of scope, and who attained to such a
position of political and intellectual leadership that they were able
to force it almost unchanged upon the whole population, and to endow it
with such vitality that it successfully resisted alien opposition later
on. And on the other hand, one sees a complex of social and economic
conditions which worked in countless irresistible ways against the rise
of that dionysian spirit, that joyful acquiescence in life, that
philosophy of the _Ja-sager_, which offers to Puritanism, today as in
times past, its chief and perhaps only effective antagonism. In other
words, the American of the days since the Revolution has had Puritanism
diligently pressed upon him from without, and at the same time he has
led, in the main, a life that has engendered a chronic hospitality to
it, or at all events to its salient principles, within.

Dr. Kellner accurately describes the process whereby the aesthetic
spirit, and its concomitant spirit of joy, were squeezed out of the
original New Englanders, so that no trace of it showed in their
literature, or even in their lives, for a century and a half after the
first settlements. "Absorption in God," he says, "seems incompatible
with the presentation (_i.e._, aesthetically) of mankind. The God of the
Puritans was in this respect a jealous God who brooked no sort of
creative rivalry. The inspired moments of the loftiest souls were filled
with the thought of God and His designs; spiritual life was wholly
dominated by solicitude regarding salvation, the hereafter, grace; how
could such petty concerns as personal experience of a lyric nature, the
transports or the pangs of love, find utterance? What did a lyric
occurrence like the first call of the cuckoo, elsewhere so welcome, or
the first sight of the snowdrop, signify compared with the last Sunday's
sermon and the new interpretation of the old riddle of evil in the
world? And apart from the fact that everything of a personal nature must
have appeared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric poetry were
offen