# New England

New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

## Quotes

* The one great poem of New England is her Sunday.
** Henry Ward Beecher, in William Drysdale, compiler, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887), p. 229.
* Let tyrants shake their iron rod, And Slav'ry clank her galling chains, We fear them not, we trust in God, New England's God forever reigns.
** William Billings, "Chester", in The Singing Master's Assistant (1778)
* I sing New England, as she lights her fire In every Prairie's midst; and where the bright Enchanting stars shine pure through Southern night, She still is there, the guardian on the tower, To open for the world a purer hour.
** William Ellery Channing, New England, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
* The pious ones of Plymouth who, reaching the Rock, first fell upon their knees and then upon the aborigines.
** William M. Evarts, as quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal (July 4, 1913); according to John Bartlett (ed.) Familiar Quotations, 13th ed. (1955), p. 592
* And the heavy night hung dark, The hills and waters o'er, When a band of exiles moored their bark On the wild New England shore.
** Felicia Hemans, "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers", st. 2, The League of the Alps, ... and Other Poems (1826), p. 4
* Good night, you Princes of Maine—you Kings of New England!
** John Irving, The Cider House Rules (1985), ch. 3
* He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once acknowledge.
** Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Elsie Venner (1860), ch. 1
* Every nation, like every individual, walks in a vain show—else it could not live with itself—but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind.
** Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (1937), ch. 5
* The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
** Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons (1949), p. 169.
* I first drew in New England's air, and from her hardy breast Sucked in the tyrant-hating milk that will not let me rest.
** James Russell Lowell, "On the Capture of Certain Fugitive Slaves Near Washington", Boston Courier, 19 July 1845; anthologized in Poems (1848).
* Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
** James Russell Lowell, "New England Two Centuries Ago", Literary Essays, vol. II (1870-1890).
* It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.
** James Russell Lowell, "New England Two Centuries Ago", Literary Essays, vol. II (1870-1890).
* There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration — and regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of twenty-four hours.
** Mark Twain, New England Weather, speech to the New England Society (December 22, 1876).
* One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.
** Mark Twain, New England Weather, speech to the New England Society (December 22, 1876).
* We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.
** Walt Whitman, "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," letter to the Philadelphia Press (20 July 1883), later published in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), part V: November Boughs.
* From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk.
** John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell.

## See also

* New England Skeptical Society
* New England's Dark Day