be just,
the wish to be righteous are before the wish to be kind, merciful,
humble. A people are not a chosen people for half a dozen generations
without acquiring a spiritual pride that remains with them long after
they cease to believe themselves chosen. They are often stiffened in the
neck and they are often hardened in the heart by it, to the point of
making them angular and cold; but they are of an inveterate
responsibility to a power higher than themselves, and they are
strengthened for any fate. They are what we see in the stories which,
perhaps, hold the first place in American fiction.

As a matter of fact, the religion of New England is not now so
Puritanical as that of many parts of the South and West, and yet the
inherited Puritanism stamps the New England manner, and differences it
from the manner of the straightest sects elsewhere. There was, however,
always a revolt against Puritanism when Puritanism was severest and
securest; this resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness,
which have not yet been duly studied, and which would make the fortune of
some novelist who cared to do a fresh thing. There is also a
sentimentality, or pseudo-emotionality (I have not the right phrase for
it), which awaits full recognition in fiction. This efflorescence from
the dust of systems and creeds, carried into natures left vacant by the
ancestral doctrine, has scarcely been noticed by the painters of New
England manners. It is often a last state of Unitarianism, which
prevailed in the larger towns and cities when the Calvinistic theology
ceased to be dominant, and it is often an effect of the spiritualism so
common in New England, and, in fact, everywhere in America. Then, there
is a wide-spread love of literature in the country towns and villages
which has in great measure replaced the old interest in dogma, and which
forms with us an author's closest appreciation, if not his best. But as
yet little hint of all this has got into the short stories, and still
less of that larger intellectual life of New England, or that exalted
beauty of character which tempts one to say that Puritanism was a
blessing if it made the New-Englanders what they are; though one can
always be glad not to have lived among them in the disciplinary period.
Boston, the capital of that New England nation which is fast losing
itself in the American nation, is no longer of its old literary primacy,
and yet most of our right thinking, our high t