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

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[269] vision. One may believe that the golden age is behind us, or before us, but alas for the forlorn wisdom of him who rejects it altogether! It is not the climax of culture that a college graduate should emulate the obituary praise bestowed by Cotton Mather on the Rev. John Mitchell of Cambridge, “a truly aged young man.” Better a thousand times train a boy on Scott's novels or the Border ballads than educate him to believe, on the one side, that chivalry was a cheat and the troubadours imbeciles, and on the other hand, that universal suffrage is an absurdity and the one real need is to get rid of our voters.

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The alleged obstacle of material prosperity.

2. It is further alleged that there is serious danger to literature in a period of overwhelming material prosperity. It is a thing not to be forgotten, that for a long series of years the plain people — in Sumner's phrase — of our Northern states, at least, were habitually in advance of their institutions of learning, in courage and comprehensiveness of thought. There were long years during which the most cultivated scholar, so soon as he embraced an unpopular opinion, was apt to find