...the distinctive attribute of the new order is its technological power, a power that does not remain confined to the traditional boundaries of the city. It is a centrifugal force that threatens to break down, once and for all, the conventional contrast between these two styles of life. The Sleepy Hollow episode prefigures the emergence, after 1844, of a new, distinctively American, post-romantic, industrial version of the pastoral design. And the feelings aroused by this later design will have the effect of widening the gap, already great, between the pastoralism of sentiment and the pastoralism of mind. (p. 32)

Although fashionable, the image of America as a garden was no mere rhetorical commonplace. It expressed one of the deepest and most persistent of human motives. When Elizabethan voyagers used this device they were drawing upon utopian aspirations that Europeans always had cherished, and that had given rise, long before the...