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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. TBE LOWELL OFFERING AND ITS WRITERS. One of the most curious phases in the life of New England, and one that must always puzzle the historian of its literature, is its sudden intellectual blossoming ... More

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. TBE LOWELL OFFERING AND ITS WRITERS. One of the most curious phases in the life of New England, and one that must always puzzle the historian of its literature, is its sudden intellectual blossoming half a century ago. Emerson says, " The children of New England between 1820 and 1840 were born with knives in their brains; " and this would seem to be true, since during or very near that time, were born the majority of those writers and thinkers whose lives have been so recently and so nobly rounded out, - Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, John Pierpont, - they whose influence cannot be overestimated in bringing an ideal element into our hitherto prosaic New England life. The seeds of this intellectual growth came suddenly, as if blown from some far-off cultured land, and were sown broadcast. Some found a resting-place in this little corner of New England, where were gathered together these daughters of Puritan ancestors, and they, too, feeling the intellectual impetus, were impelled to put in writing their own crude thoughts. Their desire for self-improvement had been to some extent gratified, and they now began to feel the benefit of the educational advantages which had been opened to them. As in "Mary Barton," they " threw the shuttle with increasing sound, although Newton's 'Principia' lay open before them, to be snatched at in work-hours, but revelled over at meal-time or at night." And the " literary" girls among us would often be seen writing on scraps of paper which we hid " between whiles " in the waste-boxes , /! upon which we sat while waiting for the looms or frames to need attention. Some of these studious ones kept note-books, with abstracts of their reading and studies, or jotted down what they were pleased to call their " th...

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