In a moment of social indignation Emerson wrote:
The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men;—
Small bat and wren
House in the oak.24
The trouble was by no means confined to the hills of New Hampshire. Emerson’s friend Margaret Fuller, writing in the New York Tribune, drew on her experience in the Massachusetts village of Groton:
It is a current superstition that country people are more pure and healthy in mind and body than those who live in cities. . . . We have lived in a beautiful village, where, more favorably placed than any other person in it . . . we heard inevitably, from domestics, work-people, and school-children, more ill of human nature than we could possibly sift were we to elect such a task from all the newspapers of this city in the same space of time.25
In her remote village, stripped of the one vital reason that had brought her there, Mrs. Patterson must have felt trapped in smallness. With only the laughter of other people’s children for her music, village gossip offered her little sustenance. Triviality and narrow-minded provincialism lay all around, and, worse than that, no visible escape lightened the future.
To one with the sense of greatness in her it was a dead end. The Brontë sisters had burned their hearts out at Haworth with less cause.
The life expectancy of a girl child born in 1821 was only thirty-seven years, and Mrs. Patterson passed this age while she lived at North Groton. She had entered what was then considered middle age, and ● ● ●
24 [“Ode,” in Emerson’s Complete Works, vol. 9, Poems (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1884), p. 72.]
25Margaret Fuller: American Romantic; A Selection from Her Writings and Correspondence, ed. Perry Miller (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), p. 220. Mrs. Gaskell’s charming picture of English village life in Cranford appeared in this decade. Miss Fuller granted that in some long-established rural societies the inherited wisdom and loyalty of the past might exempt the inhabitants from her strictures.