" No single cause is
sufficient to account for this "new birth." It is a good
illustration of that law of "tension and release," which the late
Professor Shaler liked to demonstrate in all organic life. A long
period of strain was followed by an age of expansion, freedom,
release of energy. As far as the mental life of New England was
concerned, something of the new stimulus was due directly to the
influence of Europe. Just as the wandering scholars from Italy
had brought the New Learning, which was a revival of the old
learning, into England in the sixteenth century, so now young New
England college men like Edward Everett and George Ticknor
brought home from the Continent the riches of German and French
scholarship. Emerson's description of the impression made by
Everett's lectures in 1820, after his return from Germany, gives
a vivid picture of the new thirst for foreign culture. "The North
American Review" and other periodicals, while persistently urging
the need of a distinctively national literature, insisted also
upon the value of a deeper knowledge of the literature of the
Continent.
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