ing to ialeness, but yet holding out to faith, to patience and labor, freedom and public and private virtue, the promise of a latter day far off of glory, honor, and enjoyment. Everything around you spoke audibly to the senses and imagination of toil and privation, of wearisome days and sleepless nights, of serious aims, grave duties, and hope deferred without making the heart sick. You looked upon the first and hardest conflicts of civilized man with unreclaimed nature and uncivilized man. You saw all around you the blended antagonist manifestations and insignia of a divided empire. Indian wigwams and the one thousand houses of Boston sent up their smoke into the same sky. Indian canoes and the fishing and coasting craft and merchantmen, loading for Spain and Africa and the West Indies, floated upon the same waters. English grain and grasses grew among the blackened stumps of the newly fallen forest. Men went armed to their fields, to meeting, and to bring home their brides from their father's house where they had married them. It was like the contest of winter and spring described by Thomson, or like that of the good and evil principle of the Oriental superstitions; and it might at first seem doubtful which would triumph. But, when you contemplated the prospect a little more closely, when you saw what costly and dear pledges the Pilgrims had already given to posterity and the new world, when you saw the fixtures which they had settled into and incorporated with its soil, the brick college at Cambridge, and the meetinghouses sending up their spires from every clearing, when you surveyed the unostentatious but permanent and vast improvements which fifty years had traced upon the face of that stern and wild land and garnered up in its bosom, when you looked steadfastly into the countenances of those men and read there that expression of calm resolve, high hope, and fixed faith, when you heard their prayers for that once pleasant England as for a land they no longer desired to see, for the new world, now not merely the scene of their duties, but the home of their heart's adoption,- you would no longer doubt that, though the next half-century should be, as it proved, a long, bloody warfare, though the mother country should leave them, as she did, to contend single-handed with Indians, French, and an unpropitious soil and sky, though acts of navigation and boards of trade should restrain their enterprise and rob it of its rewards, that their triumph was still certain, and a later genera

tion would partake of its fruits, and be encompassed about by its glory. A thousand instructive particulars would be collected by such an antiquarian as the author of "Old Mortality," serving to illustrate the employments, customs, and character of this portion of our ancestors, and embodied in such a form as to become permanently a part of the current knowledge of an educated people. The industry of New England in 1675 had taken almost all the great leading directions in which it afterwards exerted itself with splendid success. There were then nearly five hundred fishing vessels, large and small, in the four colonies. The export of fish to the north of Spain, to Fayal and Madeira, and of lumber, pipe-staves, provisions, naval stores, and neat cattle to the West Indies, and the import of wines and West India goods employed from one to two hundred vessels more, of a larger rate, built and owned in New England. The principal import of British goods was to Boston, whence they were shipped coastwise to Maine, Hartford, and New Haven. Linen, woollen, and cotton cloth, glass, and salt, to some extent, were manufactured in Massachusetts. The flax was all raised here, the wool chiefly. The cotton was imported. The equality of fortunes was remarkable even for that age of simple habits and general industry and morality. There were only fifteen or twenty merchants worth five hundred pounds each, and there were no beggars. The most showy mansion 'contained no more than twenty rooms; but the meanest cottage had at least two stories,— a remarkable improvement since 1629, when the house of the Lady Moody, a person of great consideration in Salem, is said to have been only nine feet high, with a wooden chimney in the centre. Governor Winthrop says in his Journal that he spent in the years he was governor five hundred pounds per annum, of which two hundred pounds-rot seven hundred dollars — would have maintained him in a private condition. There were no musicians by trade. A dancing-school was attempted, but failed. But a fencing-school in Boston succeeded eminently. We all know that fencing, without foils or tuition-fees, was the daily and nightly exercise of the youth and manhood of the colonies for half the first century of their existence. It is strikingly characteristic of our fathers of that day of labor, temperate habits, and austere general morality, that a synod convened in 1679 to inquire what crying sin of practice or opinion had brought down the judgment of

God on the colonies ascribed it very much to the intemperate and luxurious habits of what they deemed a backsliding and downward age. Hubbard reckons among the moral causes of that war the pride, intemperance, and worldly-mindedness of the people; and another writer of that day denounces with most lachrymose eloquence the increasing importations of wine, threatening the Ararat of the Pilgrims with a new kind of deluge.

There are two or three subjects, among a thousand others of a different character, connected with the history of New England in that era which deserve and would reward the fullest illustration which learning and genius and philosophy could bestow. They have been treated copiously and ably; but I am sure that whoso creates the romantic literature of the country will be found to have placed them in new lights, and to have made them for the first time familiar, intelligible, and interesting to the mass of the reading community,

Let me instance as one of these the old Puritan character. In every view of it, it was an extraordinary mental and moral phenomenon. The countless influences which have been acting on man ever since his creation — the countless variety of condition and circumstances of climate, of government, of religion, and of social systems in which he has lived--never produced such a specimen of character as this before, and never will do so again. It was developed, disciplined, and perfected for a particular day and a particular duty. When that day was ended and that duty done, it was dissolved again into its elements and disappeared among the common forms of humanity apart from which it had acted and suffered, above which it had towered, yet out of which it had been by a long process elaborated. The human influences which combined to form the Puritan character from the general mind of England, which set this sect apart from all the rest of the community, and stamped upon it a system of manners, a style of dress and salutation and phraseology, a distinct, entire scheme of opinions upon religion, government, morality, and human life, marking it off from the crowds about it, as the fabled waters of the classical fountain passed underneath the sea, unmingled, unchanged in taste or color,— these things are matters of popular history, and I need not enumerate or weigh them. What was the final end for which the Puritans were raised up, we, also, in some part all know. All things here in

New England proclaim it. The works which they did, these testify of them and of the objects and reality of their mission, and they are inscribed upon all the sides of our religious, political, and literary edifices, legibly and imperishably.

But while we appreciate what the Puritans have done, and recognize the divine wisdom and purposes in raising them up to do it, something is wanting yet to give to their character and fortunes a warm, quick interest, a charm for the feelings and imagination, an abiding-place in the heart and memory and affections of all the generations of the people to whom they bequeathed these representative governments and this undefiled religion. It is time that literature and the arts should at least co-operate with history. Themes more inspiring or more instructive were never sung by old or modern bards in hall or bower. The whole history of the Puritans

of that portion which remained in England and plucked Charles from his throne and buried crown and mitre beneath the foundations of the Commonwealth, and of that other not less noble portion which came out hither from England and founded a freer, fairer, and more enduring Commonwealth, all the leading traits of their religious, intellectual, and active character, their theological doctrines, their superstitions, their notions of the divine government and economy, and of the place they filled in it, everything about them, every thing which befell them- was out of the ordinary course of life; and he who would adequately record their fortunes, display their peculiarities, and decide upon their pretensions must, like the writer of the Pentateuch, put in requisition alternately music, poetry, eloquence, and history, and speak by turns to the senses, the fancy, and the reason of the world.

They were persecuted for embracing a purer Protestantism than the Episcopacy of England in the age of Elizabeth. Instead of ceasing to be Protestants, persecution made them republicans also. They were nicknamed "Puritans" by their enemies. Then afterward they became a distinct, solitary caste,- among, but not of, the people of England. They were flattered, they were tempted, they were shut up in prison, they were baptized with the fire of martyrdom. Solicitation, violence, were alike unavailing, except to consolidate their energies, perfect their virtues, and mortify their human affections,― to raise their thoughts from the kingdoms and kings of this world and the glory of them to the contemplation of

that surpassing glory which is to be revealed. Some of them at length-not so much because these many years of persecution had wearied or disheartened them as because they saw in ìt an intimation of the will of God — sought the freedom which there they found not on the bleak seashore and beneath the dark pine forest of New England. History, fiction, literature, does not record an incident of such moral sublimity as this. Others, like Æneas, have fled from the city of their fathers after the victor has entered and fired it. But the country they left was peaceful, cultivated, tasteful, merry England. The asylum they sought was upon the very outside of the world. Others have traversed seas as wide for fame or gold. Not so the Puritans.

"Nor lure of conquest's meteor beam,

Nor dazzling mines of fancy's dream,
Nor wild adventure's love to roam

Brought from their fathers' ancient, home
O'er the wide sea the Pilgrim host.”

It was fit that the founders of our race should have been such men,that they should have so labored and so suffered, that their tried and strenuous virtues should stand out in such prominence and grandeur. It will be well for us when their story shall have grown "familiar as a household word," when it shall make even your children's bosoms glow and their eyes glisten in the ballad and nursery-tale, and give pathos and elevation to our whole higher national minstrelsy.

There is another subject connected with our early history eminently adapted to the nature and purposes of romantic literature, and worthy to be illustrated by such a literature; that is, the condition, prospects, and fate of the New England tribes of Indians at the epoch of Philip's War. It has sometimes been remarked as a matter of reproach to a community that it has suffered its benefactors to perish of want, and then erected statues to their memory. The crime does not lie in erecting the statue, but in having suffered the departed good and great, whom it commemorates, to perish. It has been our lot in the appointments of Providence to be, innocently or criminally, instruments in sweeping from the earth one of the primitive families of man. We build our houses upon their graves. Our cattle feed upon the hills from which they cast their last look upon the land, pleasant to them as it is now pleasant to us, in which through an immemorial antiquity