The most extensive literary accounts of the New England landscape produced during our period were those of Timothy Dwight and Henry Thoreau. Dwight's poem Greenfield Hill celebrates his parish as the prototypical New England town; his posthumously published Travels in New-England and New-York (4 vols., 1821–2) moves from microcosm to macrocosm, recording some eighteen thousand miles of vacation journeys and semisystematic background reading undertaken over a twentyyear period (1796–1815) when Dwight was president of Yale. Thoreau's even more prolific contribution consists, in addition to his multivolume Journal, of five more specialized books of travels both literal and metaphorical, as well as sundry essays on excursions and natural-history topics.

The apparent irreconcilability of their visions of New England makes Dwight and Thoreau an especially interesting pair. If Dwight has a unifying theme in his Travels, that theme is the nobility and soundness of the beliefs and institutions established by the Puritan saints and bequeathed to their progeny with minor modifications.