s unremitting struggle with a not
too friendly soil, her hardihood upon the seas, and her keenness in
trade, became proverbial throughout the country. Her seaport towns were
wealthy. The general standards of living remained frugal, but extreme
poverty was rare. Her people still made, as in the earliest days of
the colonies, silent and unquestioned sacrifices for education, and
her chief seats of learning, Harvard and Yale, remained the foremost
educational centers of America. But there was still scant leisure for
the quest of beauty, and slender material reward for any practitioner
of the fine arts. Oratory alone, among the arts of expression, commanded
popular interest and applause. Daniel Webster's audiences at Plymouth in
1820 and at Bunker Hill in 1825 were not inferior to similar audiences
of today in intelligence and in responsiveness. Perhaps they were
superior. Appreciation of the spoken word was natural to men trained
by generations of thoughtful listening to "painful" preaching and by
participation in the discussions of town-meeting. Yet appreciation of
secular literature was rare, and interest in the other arts was almost
non-existent.

Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and developing rapidly after
1830, came a change, a change so startling as to warrant the term
of "the Renascence of New England." No single cause is sufficient to
account for this "new birth." It is a good illustration of that law
of "tension and release," which the late Professor Shaler liked to
demonstrate in all organic life. A long period of strain was followed
by an age of expansion, freedom, release of energy. As far as the mental
life of New England was concerned, something of the new stimulus was due
directly to the influence of Europe. Just as the wandering scholars
from Italy had brought the New Learning, which was a revival of the
old learning, into England in the sixteenth century, so now young New
England college men like Edward Everett and George Ticknor brought
home from the Continent the riches of German and French scholarship.
Emerson's description of the impression made by Everett's lectures in
1820, after his return from Germany, gives a vivid picture of the
new thirst for foreign culture. "The North American Review" and other
periodicals, while persistently urging the need of a distinctively
national literature, insisted also upon the value of a deeper knowledge
of the literature of the Continent. This was the burd