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