Poets and Poetry of Springfield in Massachusetts

Excerpt from The Poets and Poetry of Springfield in Massachusetts: From Early Times to the End of the Nineteenth Century No country or community has approached its best estate until it has come to express some of its highest, holiest, tenderest and wittiest thoughts in verse. So it has been with us in this new world. There was first the struggle for life; against human enemies and natural conditions, and with political oppression. Then came plenty, with a broader intellectual life and a freer expression. Not that there was no intellectual life in the Colonial days; but it concerned itself largely with theology and uttered itself in sermons. As for the laity, they read the Bible they had and helped in making another. They discussed and speculated on heavenly things, and an old lady whom Emerson knew in his youth told him that they had to hold on hard on to the huckleberry bushes to keep from being translated. But theological discussions were very apt to be acrimonious, and political differences easily ran into bitterness. Church and party lines were sharp and divisive. In 1808, one party in Springfield celebrated the Fourth down town with a procession and a sermon in the meeting house; the other with a dinner in "the new brick store on Federal Hill." The preceding year the Democrats of this and other towns had observed the day by themselves in Agawam listening to a sermon from a famous admirer of Jefferson, Elder Leland, on the text as quoted, perhaps erroneously in the Hampden Federalist, "Separate the righteous from the vile," the latter of course being the Federalists of the day. Such an atmosphere is not very congenial to the muses; and the newspapers of Springfield, before the settlement of Dr. Peabody over the Church of the Unity in 1820, contain scarcely any verse worth quoting except as illustrative of the manners and temper of the times. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.