V 



America Climbs the Cornstalk 



SUCH plenteousness as sprang from Tidewater Virginia's 

 alluvial soil never rewarded the men and women of 

 Massachusetts who labored in their sandy fields with wooden 

 or clamshell hoes. A harvest there was, sprung from that 

 extraordinary union of herring and maize; but those who had 

 seen the golden yields of Virginia and of Calvert's Maryland 

 shook their heads and denied New England a future. 



The New England character, as this developed through two 

 hundred years, is the harvest of the New England cornfields. 

 Where man could not raise bread without persistent labor, 

 work took on a dignity it never attains in lands that return 

 easy and bumper crops. Bronson Alcott hoeing his corn and 

 turnips, chopping firewood for his shivering family struck 

 William Ellery Channing as the most inspiring object in 

 Massachusetts. But the cast in Channing's eye was an inherit- 

 ance from a New England ancestry which had never had to 

 grapple with the problems that come from having more than 

 enough. 



Where the fields yield only a frugal sufficiency, thrift 

 becomes a prized virtue. Just as the French, by sustaining a 

 large population on an ungracious soil, developed a genius for 

 proportion, utility and the mot juste all of which were also 

 among the glories of an infertile, overcrowded, frequently 

 hungry Greece the Massachusetts mind was self-trained to 

 clear, abstract thinking, and to express its thought in a lucent, 

 literary style in which is mirrored the sparse, coolly lovely New 

 England landscape. 



The doctrine of low living and high thinking which pro- 



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