Dr. Kellner accurately describes the process whereby the aesthetic
spirit, and its concomitant spirit of joy, were squeezed out of the
original New Englanders, so that no trace of it showed in their
literature, or even in their lives, for a century and a half after the
first settlements. "Absorption in God," he says, "seems incompatible
with the presentation (_i.e._, aesthetically) of mankind. The God of the
Puritans was in this respect a jealous God who brooked no sort of
creative rivalry. The inspired moments of the loftiest souls were filled
with the thought of God and His designs; spiritual life was wholly
dominated by solicitude regarding salvation, the hereafter, grace; how
could such petty concerns as personal experience of a lyric nature, the
transports or the pangs of love, find utterance? What did a lyric
occurrence like the first call of the cuckoo, elsewhere so welcome, or
the first sight of the snowdrop, signify compared with the last Sunday's
sermon and the new interpretation of the old riddle of evil in the
world? And apart from the fact that everything of a personal nature must
have appeared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric poetry were
offensive and impious to Puritan theology.
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