Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/271

The New England Village 255 whimsical epithet axid graphic phrase crowd one another along the page, but all move in the train of Wit and Wisdom, our constant companions along the way. The glimpses of New England village life that one receives in the essays wiU appeal to some readers with a charm like that of personality. The village has often been celebrated in literature from Sweet Auburn to Spoon River, but full justice has scarcely been done to the individuality and distinction of the New England village of the mid-nineteenth century. Cambridge was one of the best representatives of the type, but there were many of them. Each was hkely to have a college, or at least an academy, one orthodox and one Unitarian church, a few pleasant colonial houses, and many elms. Every- one who lived in the village had been born there, was proud of that accident, loved whatever natural beauty its trees and meadows afforded, and enjoyed a conscious satisfaction that it was not like other places. Among the residents there might be a great personaige, or even a poet, and there were certain to be enough teachers, ministers, doctors, judges, and writers to make up a coterie where ideas circulated. Dtuing the long winters, in fact, every one did considerable reading and thinking. It was for the cultivated men and women of these villages that Lowell wrote. They of all persons delighted in his essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, with its urbane reproof of criticism of our lack of urbanity; for the village cherished some dignity of manners and would accept a pre- destined hell easier than condescension from anybody. The old villages have faded, but their June gardens and winter nights, their serious talk and eager reading, their self-reUance, miti- gated by a sense of humour, live again in Lowell's prose. Wit becomes less exuberant and sagacity is the leading spirit in Lowell's later writing. Village society is disappearing, Cambridge is becoming a large city and Harvard a university, and Lowell is in Europe. Both as a poet and an essayist, he had appeared in part as a mediator or ambassador between the cvdture of the old world and the new, between the ideals of Eng- land and of the United States. In continuing this function as a foreign minister, he did not escape some censure that he was losing his faith in American democracy. To the reader today