_Of the New Time for Farmers and the New New England_
Let it be proclaimed and shouted over all the ploughlands of
the United States that the same ripening that brought our
first culture in New England one hundred years ago is taking
place in America to-day. Every State is to have its Emerson,
its Whittier, its Longfellow, its Hawthorne and the rest.
Our Puritan farmer fathers in our worthiest handful of States
waited long for their first group of burnished, burning
lamps. From the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620 to the
delivery of Emerson's address on the American Scholar was a
weary period of gestation well rewarded.
Therefore, let us be thankful that we have come so soon to
the edge of this occasion, that the western farms, though
scarcely settled, have the Chautauqua, which is New
England's old rural lecture course; the temperance crusade,
which is New England's abolitionism come again; the magazine
militant, which is the old Atlantic Monthly combined with the
Free-Soil Newspaper under a new dress; and educational
reform, which is the Yankee school-house made glorious.
All these, and more, electrify the farm-lands. Things are in
that ferment where many-sided Life and Thought are born.
Because our West and South are richer and broader and deeper
than New England, so much more worth while will our work be.
We will come nearer to repeating the spirit of the best
splendors of the old Italian villages than to multiplying the
prunes and prisms of Boston.
The mystery-seeking, beauty-serving followers of Poe in their
very revolt from democracy will serve it well. The
Pan-worshipping disciples of Whitman will in the end be,
perhaps, more useful brothers of the White Christ than all
our coming saints. And men will not be infatuated by the
written and spoken word only, as in New England. Every art
shall have the finest devotion.
Already in this more tropical California, this airier
Colorado, this black-soiled Illinois, in Georgia, with her
fire-hearted tradition of chivalry and her new and most
romantic prosperity, men have learned to pray to the God of
the blossoming world, men have learned to pray to the God of
Beauty. They meditate upon His ways. They have begun to sing.
As of old, their thoughts and songs begin with the land, and
go directly back to the land. Their tap-roots are deep as
those of the alfalfa. A new New England is coming, a New
England of ninety million souls! An artistic Renaissance is
coming. An America is coming such as was long ago prophesied
in Emerson's address on the American Scholar. This by faith,
and a study of the signs, we proclaim!