Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/383

Rh and is warranted to disconcert the most placid temperament; and so the New England woman is apt to have jagged edges and a sense of too much light for the situation. "Sweetness and light" is the desirable combination, and may come in the new union of North and South. The wise woman is she who best unites the two. Yet, arraign New England as we may—and there are many unmentioned counts in the indictment—it is certain that to her we owe the best elements in our national life. "The Decadence of New England" is a popular topic at present. It is the fashion to sneer at her limitations. Our best novelists delight in giving her barrenness, her unloveliness in all individual life—her provincialism and conceit, and strenuous money-getting.

"It is a good place to be born in," they say, "provided you emigrate early," and then they proceed to analyze her very prominent weaknesses, and to suppress as carefully as possible just judgment, either of past or present. Her scenery they cannot dispense with. Her very inadequacies and absurdities of climate involve a beauty which unites Northern sharpness of outline with Southern grace of form and color. The short and fervid summer owns charms denied a longer one. Spring comes uncertainly and lingeringly, but it holds in many of its days an exquisite and brooding tenderness no words can render, as elusive as that half-defined outline on budding twigs against the sky—not leaves, but the shadow and promise of leaves to be. The turf of the high pasture-lands springing under the foot; the smell of sweet fern and brake; the tinkle of cow-bells among the rocks, or the soft patter of feet as the sheep run