Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western writers, were then
as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace
King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South,
which they by no means fully represent.

The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover
any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days
very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the
case is now different, and the best known among living American writers
are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West
have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now
more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that
they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. On
the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were characterized
by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we
expressed something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we
accepted were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New
England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston
criticism.

Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have
mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in
Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel
Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe
was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs.
Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of
the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
dwelt in her father's house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood
for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary