STATE OF MIND, A BOSTON READER (428 pp.)Edited by Robert N. Linscott Farrar, Straus ($4.50).
"This town of Boston is become almost a Hell upon Earth, a City full of Lies and Murders and Blasphemies; a dismal Picture and Emblem of Hell." It is Cotton Mather, the fanatic 17th Century preacher, talking.
State of Mind traces the parabolic development of the Boston mindfrom Puritan bedrock to the brilliant flights of the Emersonian era, and towards the final settling in the dreary marshes of the Mayor Curley epoch. The book ends on "the late George Apley's"...
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