Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/90

Rh The grievance maintained against society by the new school of thought was of a nature to make the respondent say: "We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not wept." The status of New England, social and political, was founded upon liberal traditions. Yet these friends placed themselves in opposition to the whole existing order of things. The Unitarian discipline had delivered them from the yoke of doctrines impossible to an age of critical culture. They reproached it with having taken away the mystical ideas which, in imaginative minds, had made the poetry of the old faith. Margaret writing of these things in 1840. well says: “Since the Revolution there has been little in the circumstances of this country to call out the higher sentiments. The effect of continued prosperity is the same on nations as on individuals; it leaves the nobler faculties undeveloped. The superficial diffusion of knowledge, unless attended by a deepening of its sources, is likely to valgarize rather than to raise the thought of a nation.... The tendency of circumstances has been to make our people superficial, irreverent, and more anxious to get a living thaw to live mentally and morally.” So much for the careless crowd. In another sentence, Margaret gives us the clue to much of the "divine discontent" felt by deeper thinkers. She says: How much those of us who have been forned by the European mind have to unlearn and lay aside, if we would act here!"

The scholars of New England had indeed so devoted themselves to the study of foreign literatures as to be little familiar with the spirit and the needs of their own country. The England of the English classics, the Germany of the German poets and philosophers,