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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
New Haven. Yale University. Press. 1921.
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