delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route, and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy waves. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly, from billow to billow; the ocean breaks and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landing at last, after five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth, weak and weary from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their ship-master for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes. Shut now the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers. Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes enumerated within the early limits of New England? Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on the distant coast? Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures of other times, and find the parallel of this. Was it the winter's storm beating on the houseless heads of women and children? was it hard labor and spare meals? was it disease? was it the tomahawk? was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching in its last moments at the recollection of the loved and left beyond the sea? was it some, or all of these united, that hurried this forsaken company to their melancholy fate? And is it possible that neither of these causes, that not all combined, were able to blast this bud of hope? Is it possible that from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, not so much of admiration as of pity, there has gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so wonderful, an expansion so ample, a reality so important, a promise, yet to be fulfilled, so glorious? EDWARD EVERETT. CHARACTER OF THE PURITAN FATHERS. ONE of the most prominent features which distinguished our forefathers was their determined resistance to oppression. They seemed born and brought up for the high and special purpose of showing to the world that the civil and religious rights of man, the rights of self-government, of conscience and independent thought, are not merely things to be talked of and woven into theories, but to be adopted with the whole strength and ardor of the mind, and felt in the profoundest recesses of the heart, carried out into the general life, and made the foundation of practical usefulness, visible beauty, and true nobility. Liberty, with them, was an object of too serious desire and stern resolve to be personified, allegorized, and enshrined. They made no goddess of it, as the ancients did; they had no time nor inclination for such trifling; they felt that liberty was the simple birthright of every human creature; they called it so; they claimed it as such; they reverenced and held it fast as the unalienable gift of the Creator, which was not to be surrendered to power nor sold for wages. It was theirs as men (without it they did not esteem themselves men; more than any other privilege or possession it was essential to their happiness, for it was essential to their original nature), and therefore they preferred it above wealth and ease and country; and, that they might enjoy and exercise it fully, they forsook houses and lands and kindred, their homes, their native soil, and their fathers' graves. The principles of revolution were not the suddenly acquired property of a few bosoms; they were abroad in the land in the ages before; they had always been taught, like the truths of the Bible; they had descended from father to son, down from those primitive days when the pilgrim, established in his simple dwelling, and seated at his blazing fire, piled high from the forest which shaded his door, repeated to his listening children the story of his wrongs and his resistance, and bade them rejoice, though the wild winds and the wild beasts were howling without, that they had nothing to fear from great men's opposi tion and the bishops' rage. Here were the beginnings of the revolution. Every settler's hearth was a school of independence; the scholars were apt, and the lessons sunk deeply; and thus it came that our country was always free; it could not be other than free. As deeply seated as was the principle of liberty and resistance to arbitrary power in the breasts of the Puritans, it was not more so than their piety and sense of religious obligation. They were emphatically a people whose God was the Lord. Their form of government was as strictly theocratical, if direct communication be excepted, as was that of the Jews; insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil authority among them entirely distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction. God was their king; and they regarded him as truly and literally so as if he had dwelt in a visible palace in the midst of their state. They were his devoted, resolute, humble subjects; they undertook nothing which they did not beg of him to prosper; they accomplished nothing without rendering to him the praise; they suffered nothing without carrying up their sorrows to his throne; they ate nothing which they did not implore him to bless. That there were hypocrites among them is not to be doubted; but they were rare; the men who voluntarily exiled themselves to an unknown coast, and endured there every toil and hardship for conscience' sake, and that they might serve God in their own manner, were not likely to set conscience at defiance and make the service of God a mockery; they were not likely to be, neither were they, hypocrites. I do not know that it would be arrogating too much for them to say that, on the extended surface of the globe, there was not a single community of men to be compared with them in the respects of deep religious impressions, and an exact performance of moral duty. FRANCIS WILLIAM PITT GREENWOOD. TWO CENTURIES FROM THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. Ir, on this day, after the lapse of two centuries, one of the fathers of New England, released from the sleep of death, could reappear on earth, what would be his emotions of joy and wonder! In lieu of a wilderness, here and there interspersed with solitary cabins, where life was scarcely worth the danger of preserving it, he would behold joyful harvests, a population crowded even to satiety, villages, towns, cities, States, swarming with industrious inhabitants, hills graced with temples of devotion, and valleys vocal with the early lessons of virtue. Casting his eye on the ocean which he passed in fear and trembling, he would see it covered with enterprising fleets returning with the whale as their captive, and the wealth of the Indies for their cargo. He would behold the little colony which he planted grown into gigantic stature, and forming an honorable part of a glorious confederacy, the pride of the earth, and the favorite of heaven. He would witness, with exultation, the general prevalence of correct principles of government and virtuous habits of action. How gladly would he gaze upon the long stream of light and renown from Harvard's classic fount, and the kindred springs of Yale, of Providence, of Dartmouth, and of Brunswick ! Would you fill his bosom with honest pride,-tell him of Franklin, who made thunder sweet music, and the lightning innocent fireworks; of Adams, the venerable sage reserved by heaven, himself a blessing, to witness its blessing on our nation; of Ames, whose tongue became, and has become, an angel's; of Perry, "Blest by his God with one illustrious day, and tell him, Pilgrim of Plymouth, these are thy descendants. Show him the stately structures, the splendid benevolence, the masculine intellect, and the sweet hospitality of the metropolis of New England. Show him that immortal vessel, whose name is synonymous with triumph, and each of her masts a sceptre. Show him the glorious fruits of his humble enterprise, and ask him if this, all this, be not an atonement for his sufferings, a recompense for his toils, a blessing on his efforts, and a heart-expanding triumph for the pilgrim adventurer? And if he be proud of his offspring, well may they boast of their parentage. WILBUR FISK CRAFTS. IN MEMORY OF THE PILGRIMS. 1820. WAKE your harps' music! louder! higher! Shout like those godlike men of old, Who, daring storm and foe, On this blest soil their anthem rolled From native shores by tempests driven, And found beneath a milder heaven The home of liberty. An altar rose,-and prayers,—a ray They clung around that symbol too, And swore, while skies and waves were blue, They stood upon the red man's sod, 'Neath heaven's unpillared bow, With home, a country, and a God, |