In 1821, the year of the fifth edition of "The Sketch Book" and "The Spy" and Bryant's first volume, there was growing up in the quieter surroundings of Boston a generation of New England boys with a different training. They all went to and through college, most of them to Harvard, and after college they set to reading philosophy. Many of them came from a long line of Puritan ancestry, as Bryant did. Unlike Bryant several of them felt a distrust and dislike for the sternness of the old creeds. Yet they had the strength of Puritan character in them and the born habit of thinking deeply on "the things that are not seen and eternal." What was new in them was that they were prepared to think independently and to come to their own conclusions. The reading of these boys was no longer chiefly in Pope, Addison, and Goldsmith. It was in the great English writers who were just arriving at fame--Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle--or in the French and German philosophers. In the Concord group--Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne--the contrast with the New Yorkers is particularly striking. They were anything but men of the world. When they began to write they stayed in the seclusion of little villages and waited patiently. They matured slowly. Emerson was past middle life before America heeded him; Hawthorne was forty-six at the time of his first marked success; Thoreau's fame did not come till after his death. They were not "team workers." Emerson was a clergyman for a short while, but retired in the very year when Bryant began his long service with the _Evening Post_; Hawthorne was a recluse for fourteen years after college and then held positions reluctantly for only half of his remaining life; Thoreau never put on the harness. They were not swept into the current of city life,--"warped out of their own orbits,"--but, instead, they made Concord, whose "chief product" was literature, more famous than any center of shipping or banking or manufacture. "Concord is a little town," Emerson wrote in his Journal, "and yet has its honors. We get our handful of every ton that comes to the city." In his address at the two hundredth anniversary he dwelt on his pride in its history and character. He traced the earliest settlement, the partitioning of the land, the events leading up to the Revolution, and, in the presence of some of the aged survivors, the firing by the embattled farmers of "the shot heard round the world" in 1775. The institution in Concord that most appealed to him was the town meeting, where the whole body of voters met to transact the public business. The meetings of those two hundred years had witnessed much that was petty, but on the whole they had made for good.