The nebula which was to form a cluster about the “North American Review” did not take definite shape until 1815.  There is no such memorial of the growth of American literature as is to be found in the first half century of that periodical.  It is easy to find fault with it for uniform respectability and occasional dulness.  But take the names of its contributors during its first fifty years from the literary record of that period, and we should have but a meagre list of mediocrities, saved from absolute poverty by the genius of two or three writers like Irving and Cooper.  Strike out the names of Webster, Everett, Story, Sumner, and Cushing; of Bryant, Dana, Longfellow, and Lowell; of Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, Sparks, and Bancroft; of Verplanck, Hillard, and Whipple; of Stuart and Robinson; of Norton, Palfrey, Peabody, and Bowen; and, lastly, that of Emerson himself, and how much American classic literature would be left for a new edition of “Miller’s Retrospect”?

These were the writers who helped to make the “North American Review” what it was during the period of Emerson’s youth and early manhood.  These, and men like them, gave Boston its intellectual character.  We may count as symbols the three hills of “this darling town of ours,” as Emerson called it, and say that each had its beacon.  Civil liberty lighted the torch on one summit, religious freedom caught the flame and shone from the second, and the lamp of the scholar has burned steadily on the third from the days when John Cotton preached his first sermon to those in which we are living.

The social religious influences of the first part of the century must not be forgotten.  The two high-caste religions of that day were white-handed Unitarianism and ruffled-shirt Episcopalianism.  What called itself “society” was chiefly distributed between them.  Within less than fifty years a social revolution has taken place which has somewhat changed the relation between these and other worshipping bodies.  This movement is the general withdrawal of the native New Englanders of both sexes from domestic service.  A large part of the “hired help,”—­for the word servant was commonly repudiated,—­worshipped, not with their employers, but at churches where few or no well-appointed carriages stood at the doors.  The congregations that went chiefly from the drawing-room and those which were largely made up of dwellers in the culinary studio were naturally separated by a very distinct line of social cleavage.  A certain exclusiveness and fastidiousness, not reminding us exactly of primitive Christianity, was the inevitable result.  This must always be remembered in judging the men and women of that day and their immediate descendants, as much as the surviving prejudices of those whose parents were born subjects of King George in the days when loyalty to the crown was a virtue.  The line of social separation was more marked, probably, in Boston, the headquarters of Unitarianism, than in the other