manners are always a little formal, and the pomposity of the colonial
governor was never quite worked out of our literary men.

Let us not disparage the past. We are all grateful for the New England
culture, and especially for the little group of men in Cambridge and
Boston who did their best according to the light of their day. Their
purpose and taste did all that high ideals and good taste can do, and no
more eminent literati have lived during this century. They gave the
country songs, narrative poems, odes, epigrams, essays, novels. They
chose their models well, and drew their materials from decent and likely
sources. They lived stainless lives, and died in their professors'
chairs honored by all men. For achievements of this sort we need hardly
use as strong language as Emerson does in describing contemporary
literature: "It exhibits a vast carcass of tradition every year with as
much solemnity as a new revelation."

The mass and volume of literature must always be traditional, and the
secondary writers of the world do nevertheless perform a function of
infinite consequence in the spread of thought. A very large amount of
first-hand thinking is not comprehensible to the average man until it
has been distilled and is fifty years old. The men who welcome new
learning as it arrives are the picked men, the minor poets of the next
age. To their own times these secondary men often seem great because
they are recognized and understood at once. We know the disadvantage
under which these Humanists of ours worked. The shadow of the time in
which they wrote hangs over us still. The conservatism and timidity of
our politics and of our literature to-day are due in part to that
fearful pressure which for sixty years was never lifted from the souls
of Americans. That conservatism and timidity may be seen in all our
past. They are in the rhetoric of Webster and in the style of Hawthorne.