The Flowering of New England

The Flowering of New England.
Van Wyck Brooks.
New York: EP Dutton and Company, Inc. 1936/1952.

Tells the story of the New England Renaissance in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War.

It was a springtime surge of energy and intellect, a revolution against theology which had crushed the human spirit and confidence. People were no longer willing to be damned. The New England air was filled with a sense of expectation. The present age was the spring season in the moral world. In Boston, a morning freshness and a thrill of conscious activity. For Bancroft, God was visible in history and history culminated in the United States. There was a springtime feeling in the air, a joyous sense of awakening, a free creativeness and unconscious pride. The New England mind had crystallized. There was a renaissance in Boston, one of those "heats and genial periods" of which Emerson spoke in "English Traits," by which "high tides are caused in the human spirit."

Whittier brought back the painted autumn woodlands, the pumpkin pies of old, the old-fashioned winter that seemed so different from the modern winter because of the modern devices that had softened its rigor.

It was an age of scholarship and high standards. Noah Webster sought to standardize the English language as a way to bind the union. Every New Englander sought to be learned in something. The very cattle lying under the trees seemed to have great and tranquil thoughts. Emerson spoke to the individuals in each of his hearers.

The issue of slavery: Channing's book showed the effects on the slave and the masters. If Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin didn't start the Civil War, it certainly contributed to it. Mrs. Stowe felt that it was not herself but God who wrote the tale of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz talked with his enchanting verbs and drawing his illustrations on the blackboard, so that one saw the insects and fishes bursting from the eggs. He infected everyone with his zeal for nature. Emerson, observing the rocks, the grasses, the fishes, the insects, the lions, vultures and elephants, felt a conviction stirring in him that all these forms of life expressed some property in himself.

It was an exciting time to be alive.