Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[102] anemone or a cluster of trailing arbutus. In the Eastern and Middle States, where town is more accessible, one nevertheless finds not infrequently the same quality, either in cultivated families living by preference in the country, or in what is distinctly and unquestionably the local population. It is rare to go into any school-house of a country town in New England, and not see some one child who has a genuine and winning gracefulness of manner. She may be of foreign parentage or she may be descended from those who came in the Mayflower; she may have inaccuracies of speech, and these may or may not add to her naive attractions; but the type is there, and it will be recognized by every observant person in connection with our Eastern and Middle States. Howells rarely deals with it-his Lydia Blood comes the nearest to it, but it is unquestionably there, and the effect of its presence, even as exhibited among children, is to make the rural life of New England far more attractive than our novelists usually paint it.

Rusticity, on the whole, fares well in English literature. When we think of it as depicted by Shakespeare, we think less of his dull or vulgar Audreys and Mopsas than of Miranda and Perdita. Both these last heroines represent a life absolutely removed from all that cities can offer; both are in part idealized, but Miranda the more so; we think of