except the innocent game of bowls." Chevalier also says: "The fusion of the European with the Yankee takes place but slowly, even on the new soil of the west; for the Yankee is not a man of promiscuous society; he believes that Adam's oldest son was a Yankee."
The Yankee was not more boastful than other types of Americans, though his talent for exaggerative description was marked. Yet he had a pronounced national obsession and was uncompromising in his patriotism: "This land o'ourn, I tell ye's got to be a better country than man ever see," was put into a Yankee's mouth by one of their own spokesmen and represents the Yankee type of mild jingoism. It is full cousin to that other sentiment which also this writer assigns to him:
Resolved, that other nations all, if set longside of us,
For vartoo, larnin, chiverlry, aint noways wuth a cuss.[1]
These are but cruder expressions of ideas dating from the Revolutionary War, and of which Timothy Dwight, who was not a poet by predestination, gave us in verse a noble example:
Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise,
The queen of the world, and child of the skies!
Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold,
While ages on ages thy splendors unfold.
Thy reign is the last, and the noblest of time,
Most fruitful thy soil, most inviting thy clime;
Let the crimes of the east ne'er encrimson thy name,
Be freedom, and science, and virtue, thy fame.
It need not be supposed that all Yankees who came to Wisconsin or other western states were familiar with these glowing lines. But it is almost certain that, in the common schools of Yankeedom, most of them had thrilled to the matchless cadences of Webster's reply to Hayne. What more was needed, by way of literary support, to a pride of country which, if a trifle ungenerous to others, was based on facts all had experienced.
- ↑ J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers.
