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General Charles Lee wrote to an English friend, that the New-Englanders were the only Americans who really understood the meaning of republicanism, and many years later De Tocqueville came to nearly the same opinion: "C'est dans la Nouvelle Angleterre que se sont combinées les deux ou trois idées principales, qui aujourd'hui forment les bases de la théorie sociale des États-Unis."
But, after all, it was the Puritans who made the sermon of such importance in religious worship as we New-Englanders now consider it; and we are absurd in considering this magnificent church and all those embroidered ceremonies only in reference to it. Before going back to the hotel, I went again up the narrow and twisted passage of College Street, to take another glance at St. William's College.
These Coventry houses, however, many of them, are much larger than any of similar style that I have seen elsewhere, and they spread into greater bulk as they ascend, by means of one story jutting over the other. Probably the New-Englanders continued to follow this fashion of architecture after it had been abandoned in the mother country.
That's what she's there for." I sithed agin, a sort of a cold sithe, and says, "I don't think it looks very well for us New-Englanders a sittin' round Plymouth Rock, to be a condemnin' anybody for their religeous beliefs." "Wall, there hain't no need of whittlin' out a stick, and worshipin' it, as the Chinamen do."
Unsuspecting, in a mood rather more amiable than usual, he asked, by way of entering into conversation, whether she and her friend were not New-Englanders. It established the sense of a bond, however light, to find that they and he were almost townsmen. He had been born in Boston, or, at least, near it. His parents had owned a house in Charlestown, where he had lived till he was ten years old.
All this is worth saying in a book published in Boston, because New-Englanders inherit a great deal of the English shyness, which the French call "mauvaise honte," or "bad shame," and they need to be cautious particularly to meet strangers a little more than half-way. Boston people, in particular, are said to suffer from the habits of "distance" or "reserve."
I distinguished between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or is not, at present.
He had expected firing of cannon and ringing of bells there was not even a flag out anywhere; the celebration of the Fourth seemed to have shrunk into a dull and decorous avoidance of all excitement. "Perhaps," suggested Miss Lamont, "if the New-Englanders keep the Fourth of July like Sunday, they will by and by keep Sunday like the Fourth of July.
But as yet little hint of all this has got into the short stories, and still less of that larger intellectual life of New England, or that exalted beauty of character which tempts one to say that Puritanism was a blessing if it made the New-Englanders what they are; though one can always be glad not to have lived among them in the disciplinary period.
After that event, the New-Englanders never settled into precisely the same quiet race which all the world had imagined them to be. They had done a deed of history, and were anxious to add new ones to the record.
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