The grievance maintained against society by the new
school of thought was of a nature to make the respondent say: "We have piped unto you, and ye have
not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have
not wept." The status of New England, social and
political, was founded upon liberal traditions. Yet
these friends placed themselves in opposition to the
whole existing order of things. The Unitarian discipline had delivered them from the yoke of doctrines
impossible to an age of critical culture. They reproached it with having taken away the mystical ideas
which, in imaginative minds, had made the poetry of
the old faith. Margaret writing of these things in
1840. well says: “Since the Revolution there has been
little in the circumstances of this country to call out
the higher sentiments. The effect of continued prosperity is the same on nations as on individuals; it
leaves the nobler faculties undeveloped. The superficial diffusion of knowledge, unless attended by a
deepening of its sources, is likely to valgarize rather
than to raise the thought of a nation.... The tendency of circumstances has been to make our people
superficial, irreverent, and more anxious to get a living
thaw to live mentally and morally.” So much for the
careless crowd. In another sentence, Margaret gives
us the clue to much of the "divine discontent" felt by
deeper thinkers. She says: How much those of us
who have been forned by the European mind have to
unlearn and lay aside, if we would act here!"
The scholars of New England had indeed so devoted themselves to the study of foreign literatures as to be little familiar with the spirit and the needs of their own country. The England of the English classics, the Germany of the German poets and philosophers,
