style, Jonathan Edwards.
After the Revolution I have but to call the roll of those names which
are the glory of New England--Hawthorne, the man of finest literary gift
who has yet appeared upon this continent; Longfellow, with his tender
touch; Holmes, with his three o'clock wit, as some one has called it,
the man who was always awake; Lowell, with his rich culture and his
passionate loyalty to all that was best in life and art; and the
historians of the country, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, and Francis
Parkman, with his splendid record of patient and tireless energy. And
then we have the New England writers of the second generation in Edmund
Clarence Stedman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Charles Dudley Warner, John Fiske, and Henry James; and we have also a
third generation.

The most striking characteristic of the older, as of the younger, New
England literature is its deep and beautiful humanism, the closeness of
its touch upon experience, the warmth of its sympathy with men and women
in contact with the great movement of life. Growing out of such a soil,
it could hardly have been otherwise, for New England represents, not an
abstraction, but a commanding faith in personality, the clear
self-realization of a man whose obligation goes straight to God, and to
whom God's word travels like an arrow's flight. In one form or another,
all the New England writers deal with this theme; they are concerned,
not with abstractions, but with the hopes and fears and temptations of
man. Hawthorne is absorbed in the problem of the return of a man's deed,
or of his ancestors' deed upon himself; Lowell cares supremely for
nobility and freedom of impulse, act and deed; Whittier for truth and
spiritual fellowship; Emerson, for the reality of spiritual force and
meaning in common duties and ordinary relations; Longfellow, for the
tenderness and purity of childhood, the sweetness and fragrance of
family relations, the charm of historic association; Holmes, for the
endless paradox and surprise which are in human thought and conduct;
Brooks, for the abundance of man's life and the fulness of its spiritual
possibilities; Curtis, for a public life at once pure, free, rich and
stable. For all these writers organization and institutions had great
interest, but they cared primarily for the men whose history these
institutions represent. The quays at Geneva are massive and shine at
night like a constellation; but our interest