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Heirs of Revolution. The great men of The Flowering of New England had been Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes. In a prose stanza with the roll of an epic, Critic Brooks described their significance: "As heirs of the Revolution, they spoke for the liberal world-community. As men who loved the land and rural customs, they shared the popular life in its roots, at its source. As readers and students of the classics, they followed great patterns of behavior, those that Europeans followed also. In short, as magnanimous men, well seasoned, they wrote with a certain authority and not as the scribes. If they believed in progress and felt that America led the way, they professed their faith in a fashion that commanded respect, for they had known doubts and struggles, wars and vigils, and they made their profession of faith as men who had won it, not without years in the wilderness and days of blindness. They had cultivated their gardens, they knew the country, the sea-coast and the homestead, the lakes and the mountains, where they had wandered as boys and lived as weather-wise men, familiar with plants and animals, the ways of nature, the trades and occupations of the people. . . . Their books were full of all these human interests, this deep sense of the local earth. . . ."
Because in speaking for themselves they spoke for most Americans, their countrymen revered the New England giants, even when age had left them like a range of extinct peaks on a receding horizon. Critic William Winter walked in the moonlight to touch the latch of Longfellow's gate. Others traveled to Concord to gaze at Emerson's woodpile. Young William Dean Howells walked up Lowell's path with palpitating heart.
Light Without Heat. The chill autumn of New England was mellowed by the light of great minds too. But it was a light without much warmth. Heroes of New England: Indian Summer are Henry & William James, Henry Adams, Howells, Francis Parkman. "They knew they were doomed to fight their fights alone, in a world that was more than likely to divide and destroy them. Some, like Henry Adams, were all but born discouraged. Others, like Henry James, were to spend ten years trying to solve the question where to live. . . . William James and Howells, who had come from the West, retained the buoyant mood of the early republic; but most of the others were cautious and conservative, cool and dis illusioned on the surface, with the know ing air of men who expect to be swindled, who cannot trust the society in which they live."
New England: Indian Summer is thronged with other New Englanders. There was the aging Whittier at his Amesbury cottage with the harebells in the garden room. "Sometimes, recalling his hairbreadth escapes in the anti-slavery days . . . the old man would leap from his seat. . . ." There was Julia Ward Howe. In the electric days of 1861, she had written The Battle Hymn of the Republic in one half-hour of genius that never returned again. Now she "rumble-tumbled" through the Newport season, communing with Kant and Spinoza, organizing her "picnics with a purpose"—"an hour or two of botany, or an astronomical evening, if the stars were out."