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There was John Fiske, who knew all the sciences and half-a-dozen languages before he entered Harvard where he added Hebrew, Sanskrit, Gothic, Icelandic, Rumanian, Dutch. "His methodical, orderly mind moved like a stone-crusher, reducing the boulders of thought to a flow of gravel that anyone could build a mental road with." Evolution was his religion. There was Francis Parkman, who had been over the Oregon Trail. Life in the West had destroyed his digestion and given him chronic insomnia. Arthritis crippled him. A nervous disorder "engulfed his mind." He had published The Conspiracy of Pontiac. It was 14 years before he could publish the next volume of his "history of the American forest."
And there was Emily Dickinson, hidden away in a big house at Amherst where few people ever saw her. She used to send her friends cryptic little notes, often only a single line: "Do you look out tonight?"; "Mrs. S. gets bigger and rolls down the lane to church like a reverend marble"; "Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the sky." She seldom addressed the notes herself. Usually the names and addresses were clipped out of a newspaper and pasted on the envelopes.
All these people moved through landscapes that Critic Brooks sees empathically as if through their eyes. "The wild flowers set the note of Whittier's country. . . . The pastoral stretches along the rivers, with their long lines of barns and sheds, blossomed with shadbush, the 'shad-blow,' for April in these valleys was the time of shadding, and the fish gave its name to flower and bird. . . ."
With such pictures of the countryside Critic Brooks heightens the dismal drama of New England's slow decline to which the book always returns. Bit by bit the great tradition ran down like the clocks that "had gone dead in many hamlets that had hummed with life." In the '80s "society had lost its vital interests. . . . In the absence of motives its mind was becalmed." The 'gos were "a day of little faith, the day of the epigoni, the successors, in whom the nineteenth century went to seed." Soon it was time for Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson's "dark tideless floods of nothingness." Soon Poet T. S. Eliot would find Boston "the wasteland of all the modern cities where the dry stone gave no sound of water" while Boston's "learned religiosity evoked in him a singular mode of Christianity—small faith, less hope, and no charity at all."
In his final chapter, Second March, Critic Brooks forecasts a second flowering of New England. He sees its seeds in the life and works of late great Poetess Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill, and especially Robert Frost, whose function, thinks Critic Brooks, is "to mediate between New England and the mind of the rest of the nation." This chapter reads like an afterthought. Critic Brooks's task was finished before he wrote it. His task was to create an intellectual tradition that could feed the newly emerging U. S. cultural nationalism.