Her people still
made, as in the earliest days of the colonies, silent and
unquestioned sacrifices for education, and her chief seats of
learning, Harvard and Yale, remained the foremost educational
centers of America. But there was still scant leisure for the
quest of beauty, and slender material reward for any practitioner
of the fine arts. Oratory alone, among the arts of expression,
commanded popular interest and applause. Daniel Webster's
audiences at Plymouth in 1820 and at Bunker Hill in 1825 were not
inferior to similar audiences of today in intelligence and in
responsiveness. Perhaps they were superior. Appreciation of the
spoken word was natural to men trained by generations of
thoughtful listening to "painful" preaching and by participation
in the discussions of town-meeting. Yet appreciation of secular
literature was rare, and interest in the other arts was almost
non-existent.
Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and developing rapidly
after 1830, came a change, a change so startling as to warrant
the term of "the Renascence of New England.
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