nfederate States are noted for the
fertility of the soil." But these are innocent adaptations; one must
look to the arithmetics for sectional feeling.

In Webster's time, men whose lives had been spent in the struggle for
independence and autonomy looked upon everything relating to their
country with a concentration of interest which not only attested the
sincerity of their convictions, but made them indifferent to the larger,
more universal standards. They were seeing things with American, not
European eyes. When Dr. Belknap and his friend Mr. Hazard were carefully
arranging for the publication of the "History of New Hampshire," they
made proposals to the Longmans, in London, to take an edition, without
any apparent suspicion that such a book might lack readers in England.
The publishers' polite reply intimates the "apprehension that the
history of one particular province of New England would not be of
sufficient importance to engage the attention of this country, and
particularly as it is at present brought down no lower than the year
1714." Belknap's History is an admirable piece of work, the first
scholarly work of its kind on this side of the water, and Dr. Belknap
respected his book. To him, as to many of that generation, a book was a
serious undertaking, and each new one that came was carefully weighed
and its character measured; a history of New Hampshire was not a mere
piece of local self-complacency, but a dignified adventure into a
portion of American history hitherto unexplored. The work expended upon
it was as careful and grave as if the subject had been the Peloponnesian
War. Indeed, one of the substantial evidences of the historic
justification of the war for independence is to be found in the alacrity
with which the scholarly element in the country busied itself about
themes which were close at hand and connected with the land of their
life.

Literature in its finer forms had but slender encouragement. The absence
of easy communication, the poverty of the people, the dispersion of the
population, gave little chance for bookstores and circulating libraries
and private accumulation. It must not be forgotten, either, that the era
of cheap books had not yet come in England, and that the periodical form
was still in embryo. To look back on one of the rather juiceless
periodicals which sprang up so frequently at the beginning of our
literature because they had no depth of earth, and withered away
rootless an