teenth century developed itself outside of New England,we may say that this literary activity reached its acme in the work of Poe, itself for all its merit not deeply significant. And even in Poe's time, and still more surely a little later, the literature of which he proves the most important master declined into such good-humored trivialities as one finds in the Knickerbocker Gallery and in the life and work of Willis. By the middle of the nineteenth century the literary impulse of the Middle States had proved abortive. For the serious literature of America we must turn to New England.

BOOK V

THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW

ENGLAND

BOOK V

THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW

ENGLAND

I

SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW ENGLAND

ners.

REFERENCES

EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE: On the history of New England, see the references at the head of Chapter iii of Book I and Chapter iii of Book II; many of these references concern New England life and manSee also, on colonial and provincial life, J. R. Lowell, "New England Two Centuries Ago " (Wks., Riverside Edition, I); W. B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1890; H. C. Lodge, A Short History of the English Colonies in America, New York: Harper, 1881, especially Chapter xxii; and the various books by Mrs. Alice Morse Earle.

LATER NEW ENGLAND LIFE: H. B. Stowe, Oldtown Folks, Boston, 1869; Whittier, Snow-Bound; Lowell, "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" (Wks., Riverside Edition, I, 43-99), E. E. Hale, A New England Boyhood (Wks., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1898-1901, VI, 1–208); and the various writings of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins.

FROM the time, shortly after 1720, when Franklin left Boston, where Increase and Cotton Mather were still preaching, we have paid little attention to that part of the country. For during the seventy-two years which intervened between Cotton Mather's death and the nineteenth century, Boston was of less literary importance than it