Word: puritanize
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...scientific observation are isolation of the field of observation, the well-trained observer and the accurate recorder. Certainly the first of these conditions is met in most American colleges. The institutions are located in small towns, where the college is the town, and the town is the college. Our Puritan ancestors, who wanted their colleges organized as Roman, Republics in order that the classical experience might be relived by the boys in their teens, have had their way in many respects. The American college town is a commonwealth, the living conditions in which are quite as Utopian as Comenjus...
...summary (pp. 96-97) of American literature before Longfellow seems unhappy in its choice of critical epithets, and shaky in its chronology. One may be excused for disagreeing with the biographer's view that Longfellow's appreciation of wine is an "exotic note" and an escape "from the starker Puritanism of his training," when it is remembered that belief in the legitimate use of wine--and of New England rum--seems pretty well marked in successive generations of New England Puritans. It is difficult to accept the idea that Longfellow is "the first figure in American letters to discover Europe...
After nearly three hundred years Harvard still turns out ministers in large numbers, though they are hardly the sort of ministers, as a rule, that would appeal to the early, Puritan theocrats...
...spasmodic spurts he tells the intimate story of a sensitive boy struggling to become a writer in the face of physical frailty and parental distrust, in mean towns built beside buffalo wallows. Beneath the burden runs a hysterically bitter ground-bass-a dirge for everything Puritan-and snarling discords to the effect that constipation was the pioneers' curse; that their children were rickety, their politics poltroonish, their women spavined, their teeth acid, their minds (including the author's) stunted and deranged, all because they failed to raise cabbages and take lime into their systems...
...implies more than the destruction of obstacles in the way of Truth. It implies responsibility. Nor have Harvard men at any time foresworn responsibility. Some words have less illumined connotations than others. Responsibility to many must remain a gray word. Cambridge is a gray place. New England to the Puritan eye which first sighted the rocks of an uncongenial coastline from the small but purposive "Mayflower" was a gray land. The Puritan mind was a gray mind. But Harvard College owes its existence to that gray land, to that gray mind. For out of the dull, hard labor of founding...