To understand the literary leadership of New England during the
thirty years immediately preceding the Civil War it is necessary
to recall the characteristics of a somewhat isolated and peculiar
people. The mental and moral traits of the New England colonists,
already glanced at in an earlier chapter, had suffered little
essential modification in two hundred years. The original racial
stock was still dominant. As compared with the middle and
southern colonies, there was relatively little immigration, and
this was easily assimilated. The physical remoteness of New
England from other sections of the country, and the stubborn
loyalty with which its inhabitants maintained their own standards
of life, alike contributed to their sense of separateness. It is
true, of course, that their mode of thinking and feeling had
undergone certain changes. They were among the earliest theorists
of political independence from Great Britain, and had done their
share, and more, in the Revolution. The rigors of their early
creed had somewhat relaxed, as we have seen, by the end of the
seventeenth century, and throughout the eighteenth there was a
gradual progress toward religious liberalism. The population
steadily increased, and New England'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