132 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



liant group of men, living at the same time in the vicinity 

 of Boston. Longfellow's mission was to refine our taste, 

 — he was the pioneer of culture. In England he was called 

 the poet of the middle classes. Those classes, however, 

 include the majority of intelligent readers. Puritanism 

 was opposed to beauty, and looked upon sentiment as idle 

 and weak. Longfellow so beguiled their reason through 

 their finer senses that they were satisfied that loveliness 

 and righteousness might go hand in hand. He began as 

 a translator, and so remained all his life, and infused 

 the fine essence of European poetry into his own. The in- 

 fluence for good exerted by his tenderness and truth is 

 boundless. He gave a long, clean life to his work. He 

 tells how beautiful it is to mix with and read the world, yet 

 keep a pure heart, avoiding recklessness and vice. He 

 admonishes us to go forth to meet the future without fear 

 and with a stout heart. His successors do not find him 

 satisfactory in style, but his wisdom and faithfulness to 

 the best things in life have rested in the hearts of many 

 friends. 



Among these literary men of that day Holmes ranked 

 first in versatility ; Lowell, as critic ; Bancroft, Motley and 

 Prescott are our own historians ; Whittier sang his songs 

 straight out from the heart, — his poems on slavery were 

 like the blast of the last trump. Great movements have 

 always taken character from the literature of the day. Har- 

 riet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" did more than 

 any other literary agency to rouse the people to the sense of 

 a neglected duty. She did more than Garrison, Whittier, 

 Lowell, Sumner or Phillips. 



The war of the Rebellion brought changes in the intellect- 

 ual forces of our country. Authorship was no new thing. 

 Thought had passed from nation to nation, from Greece to 

 Italy, from Italy to France, from France to England, from 

 England to France and Germany, etc. All the old writers 

 — Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare — borrowed from Italy, 

 Goethe and Voltaire from England, and all writers from 

 Greece and Rome. America has always been proud. The 

 war gave us new pride, and we disliked to borrow from 



