New England

“ Life’s currents pursue a tangled course, and while we catch many strains of harmony, there are discordant notes of which we rarely get entirely out of hearing. New England is not perfect, but once to have known is always to love it, no matter how far one wanders or how fair new regions open before one’s eyes. ”

“ Against that, sir, we have New England, recruiting the Republic from its sturdy loins, shaking from its overcrowded hives new swarms of workers, and touching this land all over with its energy and its courage. ”

“ It was usual, in an earlier and less critical day, to trace all of New England's greatness, and of her noble contributions to our common American life, to the same little group of leaders, who were supposed to have done all because they did much. Life is not so simple as that, and in the founding of New England, and the development of her liberties, we must find place for English kings and statesmen, for colonial liberals and martyrs, as well as for Pilgrim Father and Puritan Priest. ”

“ But just beyond the rugged barrier of those western hills lies a grander landscape, of wide extent, through which flows New England’s greatest river, and crossed front end to end by New England’s busiest thoroughfares, dusty with the tread of commerce, and bordered with growing cities and thrifty, busting towns. ”

“ For more than two centuries the cold and rocky soil of New England has yielded its annual tribute, and it still lies green and luxuriant beneath the sun of our brief summer. The nerved and ever-exercised arm of free labor has changed a landscape wild and savage as the night scenery of Salvator Rosa into one of pastoral beauty,—the abode of independence and happiness. Under a similar system of economy and industry, how would Virginia, rich with Nature's prodigal blessings, have worn at this time over all her territory the smiles of plenty, the charms of rewarded industry! ”

“ But without that Sunday, and without that preaching, New England would have been a quite different land; America another nation altogether; the world by no means so far advanced as now. New England with her descendants has always been the superior portion of America. I flatter no man's prejudice, but speak a plain truth. She is superior in intelligence, in morality—that is too plain for proof. The prime cause of that superiority must be sought in the character of the fathers of New England ”

“ The mind will expand itself to the measure of things about it. Deep in the wide American soul there shall be Lake Superiors, inland oceans of thought; and the streams of her eloquence shall be like the sweep of the Mississippi in his strength. The rugged strength of the New England hills, the luxuriance of the sunny South, the measureless expanse of the prairie, the broad flow of our rivers, the dashing of our cataracts, the huge battlements of the everlasting mountains,—these are American. On the face of the globe there is nothing like to them. ”

“ They are written with a consciousness of the manly virtues, and solid worth, of New England, as she is, and always has been. They simply mark points of difference worked upon men by a change of soil and society—points that should be known, whether approved or condemned. What son of New England does not look back upon her with pride? ”

“ I look to see the country turn back to New England, not only with historic pride, but with a rich appreciation of its artistic mother-land—not mistaking her for its bleak and apprehensive maiden aunt! ”

“ And still New England.—Sui Generis.—Her Ruggedness the Soil of Liberty.—The Contrast.—The New England Conservative.—The New England Man of Business.—The West has no Past.—Fast, and Hospitable.—Saxon Blood and Saxon Spirit.
Such is a picture of some of the old-school New England men, as they flourished years ago. Such are some of the portraits and images that rise up, and stand out vividly before me.
New England is unlike anything the pioneer sees, hears, or feels in a wilderness country. She is unlike his country in her creation. ”

“ It was not to be expected of the colonists of New England that they should be the first to see through a delusion which befooled the whole civilised world, and the gravest and most knowing persons in it.—The people of New England believed what the wisest men of the world believed at the end of the seventeenth century.—PALFREY, New England, iv. ”

“ The history of New England is written imperishably on the face of a continent, and in characters as beneficent as they are enduring. In the Old World national pride feeds itself with the record of battles and conquests;—battles which proved nothing and settled nothing ”

“ It is curious and pleasant, to my apprehension, to observe how many people in New England, one of whose States is called "the land of Steady Habits," are sensible of the joy of changing them,—out of doors. These good folk turn out from their comfortable farm-houses and their snug suburban cottages to go a-gypsying for a fortnight among the mountains or beside the sea. ”

“ They were strong men, one and all, quiet and self-contained in years of peace, grim fighters in seasons of war, and prominent citizens at all times, a godly, gritty, and prosperous race. Of such is the greatness of New England. ”

“ We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature. ”

“ New England's sons had become the organizers of a Greater New England in the West, captains of industry, political leaders, founders of educational systems, and prophets of religion, in a section that was to influence the ideals and shape the destiny of the nation in ways to which the eyes of men like Cotton Mather were sealed. ”

“ Rude, ignorant, and in some of its habits half barbarous, this population, in the stiffness of its religious and social expression, resembled the New England of a century before rather than the liberality of the Union. ”

“ My friends, it is not strange that the wealth and the conscience of New England should arouse itself to the opportunities which God has held out to you in the present age. There are persons within the sound of my voice within whose lifetime twenty new states will be admitted to this Union from territory which now is scarcely settled. ”

“ The old spirit of New England has been sensibly going out of the world, as the old saints in whom it was have gone; and, instead thereof, the spirit of the world, with a lamentable neglect of strict piety, has crept in upon the rising generation. ”

“ The “New England idea” and the “New England type” have been as sharply defined as they have been persistent; and, if, in our own day, they seem, to some extent, to be passing, their influence may be no less living because spread broadcast throughout the whole land, and absorbed into the common national life. Effective natural boundaries, defining a limited area, are of determining influence in fostering the life of primitive peoples or of civilized colonies. ”

“ This was peculiarly true of men from New England, whose intelligence as well as interest seemed continually walking a tight-rope. The New Englander was always and ever the sublimation of a blind, ineffable vanity that went about proposing him as an example to the race. ”

“ Yet, arraign New England as we may—and there are many unmentioned counts in the indictment—it is certain that to her we owe the best elements in our national life. "The Decadence of New England" is a popular topic at present. It is the fashion to sneer at her limitations. Our best novelists delight in giving her barrenness, her unloveliness in all individual life—her provincialism and conceit, and strenuous money-getting. ”

“ Yet the pages which record the story of those seventeen years are among the least attractive in New England history. There is hardly an incident to stir the imagination or to fire a noble pride. Freed from all restraint, the best use that the colonies could make of their liberty was to quarrel among themselves over boundaries, annexations, and taxes; to contend, without honor, with the Dutch and French ”

“ New England, my country, I love thee for these.
The homes of New England, free, fortuned, and fair;
Oh, many a heart treasures its seraphim there,
E’en more than thy mountains or streamlets they please,
New England, my country, I love thee for these.
God shield thee, New England, dear land of my birth,
And thy children that wander afar on the earth;
Thou still art my country, where’er I am cast,—
Take thou to thy bosom my ashes at last.
[Pg 71]
The Old Folks we Loved Long Ago.
Battling with life,
’Mid care and strife,
The daily toils in hope I undergo ”

“ Pulpit Literature in New England.—In our progress over the various fields of literature in New England during the colonial time, we encounter not one form of writing in which we are permitted to lose sight of the clergy of New England,—their tireless and versatile activity, their learning, their force of brain, their force of character. ”

“ The New England leaders were, indeed, of a more intellectual type generally than came to the other colonies, and there was, perhaps, more play of mind among the people than in either the southern continental or the island settlements. ”

“ The New England men still exhibit a distinct feature in American society, and probably possess more virtue, intelligence, and independence of character than is to be found in any other state in the union.—See Doctor Dwight’s Travels in New England. ”

“ The growth of New England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a busy multitude, each in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It was a vain attempt. ”

“ In the New England group we have one which, in spite of minor differences, is unusually homogeneous. Not only are the boundaries between the six states which now form it negligible, but the section, as a whole, is a geographical unit, within which a common life, based upon generally similar economic, political, and religious foundations, has constituted a distinct cultural strain in the life of the nation. ”

“ The mores of New England, however, still show deep traces of the Puritan temper and world philosophy. Perhaps nowhere else in the world can so strong an illustration be seen both of the persistency of the spirit of the mores and of their variability and adaptability. The mores of New England have extended to a large immigrant population and have won large control over them. ”

“ The true characteristics of American society, as I have said, are showing themselves more and more distinctly to the westward of New England, and come back to it in a tide that steadily sweeps away the old traditions. ”

“ They brought the foundation of a free people, they converted the wilderness of a continent, they established the New England home, rich only in piety, education, liberty, industry and character, from which has gone out the best inspiration of the Republic they forecast. ”

“ Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance with society in New England, during the last twenty-five years, with those middle and with those leading sections that may constitute any just representation of the character and aim of the community, will have been struck with the great activity of thought and experimenting. ”

“ But there is rising a new New England in the West, a vast empire in the States of the Northwest and in Canada, to which New England is as a province,—an empire that in one hundred years will lead the thought, the invention, and the statesmanship of the world. ”

“ New England was not so much the colony of a mother country, as a Hagar driven forth into the wilderness. The little self-exiled band which came hither in 1620 came, not to seek gold, but to found a democracy. ”

“ The earliest settlers of New England had been of a religious, thoughtful, and philosophical disposition, and their manners and mode of life had served to strengthen these tendencies in their descendants. ”

“ New England, originally settled by sturdy and liberty-loving yeomen and free citizens of free English cities, was never a congenial home for the patrician, with inherited feudal privileges, but has welcomed the thrifty Pilgrim, the Puritan, the Scotch Covenanter, the French Huguenot, the Ironsides soldiers of the great Cromwell. ”

“ We call New England character hardy, stern, and stalwart. Well it might be, by having the teachings of this Primer enforced in men's lives and labors. We may not admire some of the doctrines, but for the times they made the noblest and strongest of men. ”

“ The men and women of this fusion have shaped our civilization. New England gave its distinctive character to the American colonies, and finally to the nation. New England influences still breathe from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the great lakes to Mexico; and Boston, still the focus of the New England idea, leads national movement and progress. ”

“ The following account of the founding of New England is intended to serve as an introduction to the later history of that section, and to the study of its relations with other portions of the Empire and with the mother-country, as well as of the section’s influence upon the nation formed from such of the colonies as subsequently revolted. ”

“ Our attention will be drawn toward England as the battle-ground and the seventeenth century as the critical moment of the struggle; we shall see in Puritanism the tremendous militant force that determined the issue; and when our perspective has thus become properly adjusted, we shall begin to realize for the first time how truly wonderful was the age that witnessed the Beginnings of New England. ”

“ If, however, we shift from our usual point of view and, instead of studying the English emigration of the time in the light of the leaders who reached New England, consider the great body of those who left the shores of England, we shall have to account for those fourteen emigrants out of every fifteen, who, although willing to leave their homes and all they had held dear, yet shunned active participation in the Bible Commonwealths. ”