Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

[202] cheery Englishman pursues his investigations, a tone so absolutely remote from that of any New England excursion into the wilderness; but North and South at that time never came in contact. A hundred years later — that is, sixty or seventy years ago — relations had begun to exist between the far-off regionspolitically at Washington; socially in Philadelphia, where the Virginia ladies did their shopping; educationally in New England, whither the Southern boys came in shoals to the Harvard Law School under Judge Story, and whence tutors and governesses were sent, on very low pay, to teach the white children on the plantations. During my own college days, in 1841, I spent weeks on my uncle's plantation in northern Virginia, where he had married into a prominent Virginia family. The old life prevailed, but impoverished. The cotton planters farther south were still rich, but unceasing tobacco crops had exhausted the land; they had books also, but old, like the buildings, and they were mainly kept in the little office of the owner, with the door always open, night or day — whole sets of old English reviews and magazines in wornout bindings, and hardly a book that had