Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[109] library in America by an importation of some forty-five pounds' worth of English books; among which the work of many of those authors was doubtless included. They were, in fact, the authors upon whom the taste of our best writers during the next century was to be formed. They were the fashionable English models for the cultivation of “polite letters.”

But whatever the pursuit of such a practical ideal might be able to do for the literary manners of a still provincial people, it could not lead to the production of an original and robust literature. What Americans needed toward the middle of the nineteenth century was to be given contact, not merely with the courtly pens of England and France, but with the great minds of all the world and of all times. It was this impulse toward wider contact, or culture, which was first apparent, not unnaturally, in serious New England. The intellectual movement which followed, Professor Wendell suggestively calls “the New England Renaissance.” “In a few years,” he says, “New England developed a considerable political literature, of which the height was reached in formal oratory; it developed ”