The mission of all the great New England writers of this age was to make individuals freer, more cultivated, more self-reliant, more kindly, more spiritual. Puritan energy and spirituality spoke through them all. Nearly all could trace their descent from the early Puritans. It is not an infusion of new blood that has given America her greatest writers, but an infusion of new ideals. Some of these ideals were illusions, but a noble illusion has frequently led humanity upward. The transcendentalists could not fathom the unknowable, but their attempts in this direction enabled them to penetrate deeper into spiritual realities. The New Englander demanded a cultivated intellect as the servant of the spirit. He still looked at the world from the moral point of view. For the most part he did not aim to produce a literature of pleasure, but of spiritual power, which he knew would incidentally bring pleasure of the highest type. Even Holmes, the genial humorist, wished to be known to posterity by his trumpet call to the soul to build itself more stately mansions. THE INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY.--The question of human slavery profoundly modified the thought and literature of the nation. In these days we often make the mistake of thinking that all of the people of New England disapproved of slavery at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. The truth is that many of the most influential people in that section agreed with the South on the question of slavery. Not a few of the most cultivated people at the North thought that an antislavery movement would lead to an attack on other forms of property and that anarchy would be the inevitable result. Opposition to slavery developed naturally as a result of the new spirit in religion and human philosophy. This distinctly affirmed the right of the individual to develop free from any trammels. _The Dial_ and Brook Farm were both steps toward fuller individuality and more varied life and both were really protests against all kinds of slavery. This new feeling in the air speedily passed beyond the color line, and extended to the animals. One of the earliest to advocate the abolition of slavery was WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (1805-1879), a printer at Newburyport, Massachusetts. In 1831 he founded _The Liberator_, which became the official organ of the New England abolitionists. He influenced the Quaker poet Whittier to devote the best years of his life to furthering the cause of abolition. Emerson and Thoreau spoke forcibly against slavery. Lowell attacked it with his keenest poetic shafts.