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Older cultures had their feeder roots deep in the soil. This meant more than the tactile love that can tell the soil's fertility and tilth from a little dirt crumbled be tween two fingers. It meant the abiding shadowy love of the soil because of the generations who have gone into it and populate it. For culture of this kind U. S. history was too short.
Critic Brooks's problem was to put in place of this traditional culture of the soil, mortuary and ancestral, the only thing that could take its place — the legend of an outburst of native thought, fertile, intense, creative, a mythology of minds. He found it in the flowering of New England.
But the decline of New England was just as essential to the completeness of this legend. The twilight of authentic gods is grand rather than gloomy. The greatness of the New England mind was authentic and the best guarantee of its later revival. Wrote Critic Brooks: "The goldenrod rises again in its season, and the folk poem recovers its meaning when the heart of a nation, grown old, returns to its youth."