ished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we
expressed something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we
accepted were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New
England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston
criticism.

Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have
mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in
Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel
Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe
was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs.
Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of
the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
dwelt in her father's house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood
for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary
impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like
to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent
itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature,
though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are
in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law,
science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have
no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. I
arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a literary
coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These expressed
with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and brought forth
in good works; but that moment of maturity was the beginning of a
decadence which could only show itself much later. New England has
ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never again have
anything like a national literature; but that was something like a
national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before the
life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from the
New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. It
will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such imagination
as Hawthorne's, such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry as Longfellow's,
such prophecy as Whittier's, such wit and grace as Holmes's, such humor
and humanity as Lowell's.

The literature of those great men was,