Subject: Rift passing over into avarice, and mental

From: Culberson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:11:20 +0200

E riches of German and French scholarship. Emerson's description of the
impression made by Everett's lectures in 1820, after his return from
Germany, gives a vivid picture of the new thirst for foreign culture.
"The North American Review" and other periodicals, while persistently
urging the need of a distinctively national literature, insisted also
upon the value of a deeper knowledge of the literature of the Continent.
This was the burden of Channing's once famous article on "A National
Literature" in 1823: it was a plea for an independent American school of
writers, but these writers should know the best that Europe had to
teach. The purely literary movement was connected, as the great name of
Channing suggests, with a new sense of freedom in philosophy and
religion. Calvinism had mainly done its work in New England. It had bred
an extraordinary type of men and women, it had, helped to lay some of
the permanent foundations of our democracy, and it was still destined to
have a long life in the new West and in the South. But in that stern
section of the country where its influence had been most marked there
was now an increasingly sharp reaction against its determinism and its
pessimism. Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and
influential churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had
accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. The
move