In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

Our country was not young from the beginning. It had to achieve youth. From the Old World came old shoots: the transplantation as often as not aggravated their antiquity. Ere we could be young, our elements had to rot and to be remingled. This took time. And it may broadly be said that only with the opening of the West and the demise, in civil war, of our old sectional cultures, did America become at last a single sprawling infant.

Even then, the sectional elderships persisted. They took many forms. None more pleasant than the glowing second childhood of New England which stands expressed in the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. These are tales mostly of Maine in the later decades of the nineteenth century. And rightly enough the best of them are about old women. The occasional story of a child is sicklied over with an aged cast: for instance, Sylvia of "A White Heron" is an old woman's child, and lives with an old woman. And when there is a wooing in "The Country of the Pointed Firs" the maid has grown grey in service of her mother; the man-son of the almost centenarian Mrs. Blackett-is a simpleton past fifty. But whether the scene be the Poor Farm or a spruce island home or the tiny palace of Queen Victoria's Twin, there is ever a single glamorous illusion making the substance and life of these sweet tales. And it is the manner of illusion that dwells in the hearts of folks who have grown sweetly childish, rather than sour, in their senility.