here speak to the soul. The immensity of the ocean, and the savage solitudes of the forest, - they gave a stern elevation to the character; but none of those graceful wreaths and tendrils of what is symbolical and poetical in antiquity and in life adorned the stern Puritanism of the New England character.

England, too, at this time deserved the epithet of "Merry England." Fairs, merry-makings, games, and sports were constantly recurring in the mother land. The old maskings, the Christmas games, the thousand quaint devices and amusements of fairs, the harvest-home, the May-pole and festival, Punch and Judy, the Merry-Andrew, - all were cut off from the youthful mind in this country. Life was stripped at once, as with an iron hand, of all gayety, as we see the gay, flowering weeds of a summer morning cut down with one swoop of the scythe.

All these circumstances, and many others which I cannot mention, account for that remarkable modification which took place in the character of the second generation, or rather in the first born upon the soil, and that has transmitted its deep coloring to their descendants in New England even to the present day. They account for the added austerity and bigotry of that and the next generation; and the consideration of all these genial influences, at once stripped away, should mitigate the severity of our judgment when we look upon their narrow views, their severity towards those who differed from them, and their apparent cruelty to the Quakers. Life, as we have seen, was robbed at once for them of the softening influences of antiquity, of the sentiment of loyalty and reverence of those of higher rank, of the genial effects of gayety and social amusements, and of all the beautiful poetry of existence spread like wild-flowers upon the rough granite of life; and what did they receive as a compensation? They were the chosen people, the favorites of the Most High. They had been led into the wilderness by the Almighty, to do and to suffer for a peculiar work, a most holy purpose, - to preserve the true faith once delivered to the saints, and to found a church perfect in doctrine and in practice. They, like the Jews of old, were to be a peculiar, a chosen people. The cloud and the pillar of fire were to guard them by day and by night. Not civil, but religious, bondage was the result. They had suffered the hardships, they had borne the heat and burden of the day, to earn the privilege of sitting down at evening, under the shadow of their own vine and their own fig-tree, to worship God in their own way, to have the Most High draw near and to sit down in intimate communion with Him. Thus all who disturbed their worship were aliens and enemies, to be thrust out from among them; heathen, to whom the whole country was wide enough, but from whose incursions their own little inclosure was shut and barred.

CHAPTER II.

"Before these fields were shorn and tilled,
Full to the brim the rivers flowed;

The melodies of waters filled

The fresh and boundless wood;

And torrents dashed, and rivulets played,
And fountains spouted in the shade." - BRYANT.

LET us go back in imagination to a September afternoon in the year 1660. The season and the hour was one of almost unparalleled beauty. It was the first day of September. Nature had put off her bridal robes, and assumed the paler and faded tints of widowhood, preparatory to the gorgeous drapery with which she would celebrate a few weeks later the funeral of the year. A cloudless sky and a deep repose rested upon the earth, and seemed to brood over the calm waters of the bay. The trees of the hundred islands with which it is studded, not then, as now, stripped of their native forests, caught the rays of the declining sun in their topmost branches, while the light scarcely penetrated the close undergrowth beneath. The sails of many small vessels, coming up with the evening tide, shone snowy white upon a darker background, and the setting sun glanced in diamond drops from the paddles of an Indian canoe, as it shot from island to island. Much of the little town lay in deep shadow as well as repose, built as it was close upon the water, beneath the protection of its armed heights, while the outstretched curtain of its Trimountain was assuming the gray tints of an autumn afternoon.

But the object of most intense and absorbing interest to the groups of citizens collected upon the summit of the most eastern eminence was a large and gallant ship, that had long been looked and prayed for from the mother country, and now at length, as the winds had fallen and there was a perfect calm, was coming slowly up with the evening tide. This ship was freighted with many hopes, and not without fears, for every family of the little town. It was expected, also, to confirm the rumors that had reached the colony of the restoration of Charles the Second. Perhaps even the regicides, no longer safe in England, would flee for safety to this country, and had taken refuge in that very ship.

Some rude benches had been placed upon the hill, and there were seated many of the elders of the town; some with spy-glasses at their eyes, all with a composed gravity of mien, concealing under the cold exterior of Puritan asceticism the excited feelings and the variety of passions that they in common with other men possessed. The costume of that period was not, like that of the present day, a stiff and uniform outline of dark broadcloth; the gravest gentlemen of the period, in conformity to the picturesque fashions of the time of the Charleses, wore ample cloaks of velvet, turned out with some brilliant color, and over them the broad collars of lace called vandykes, and bands of the same material. The Puritan high-crowned hat was just beginning to give place to the beaver, turned up at the side, with plumes and gold lace. Swords were worn by gentlemen, and rings upon their hands.

Perhaps there never was a time when the distinctions of rank were greater. The artisans and men of the lower classes formed a contrast indeed, with their doublets of untanned leather, or of a coarse cloth called drugget; and as they mixed with the other groups, they formed a line of distinction of ranks infinitely wider than, indeed unknown, at the present day. Groups, somewhat more lively in exterior bearing, were scattered at intervals, conversing in low tones, and the children, just released from school, were playing their childish games with an almost ludicrous gravity under the severe eyes of their elders, while the shrill treble of a young voice would sometimes rise above the subdued tone of the general conversation.

It is impossible for us at this distant day to enter into the feelings of intense and varied interest with which the different groups collected upon the hill-side watched and hailed the vessel whose white sails had been filled with the breezes of England, that mother land for which they all yearned; not that they came here, as other colonists have gone to other shores, to acquire the means of returning to spend their hard-earned wealth where their hearts had always remained. The chain that attached them to the mother country remained bright as ever; but they knew that they should find their graves, as well as their homes, in this. England had not yet done any thing to estrange them from her. Their hearts yearned towards her, as the settlers in the Far West look back to the firesides of their New England homes, where mothers, sisters, friends, and lovers still rivet their earliest and dearest memories. They identified themselves with England; her history was theirs, her literature was theirs. They had fled only from the hierarchy and the priesthood. The king, the exile king, was again theirs. From Eng