Virginia and New England so sharply. It must be confessed that, in 1732, Concord was hardly so constituted as naturally [Illustration: HOME OF EMERSON.] to give birth to Washingtons; indeed, Virginia produced but this one, amid all her great men. The extreme narrowness of Puritan opinion, even when modified by Baptists and Quakers, was not favorable to the rise of men like the great Virginians of the eighteenth century. A milder intellectual climate, a temper less given to disputes about faith and works, election and reprobation, was needful to produce characters so broad, so moderate, and yet so firm, as Washington’s. New England did give birth to Franklin, in the very midst of Mathers and Sewalls; but he had to slip away to Philadelphia, in order to grow into his full stature as philanthropist and philosopher. The intolerance of New England deprived us, for more than a century, of the opportunity to produce genius and the gentler forms of heroism. We had the Adamses to set the Revolution on foot, the soldiers of New Hampshire and rural New England to fight its battles; but its noblest leader must come to us from the Potomac, and take us back there, when the long fight was won, to establish our government beside its waters, in sight of his own broad domain. It was not till this century, now declining, that Concord could show an intellectual Washington; and Emerson must be born in Boston, less provincial than our meadowy village, our “rural Venice,” as Thoreau called it in times of river-freshet.