Helen Campbell

“ Fresh from the life not only of books but of knowledge of "the central currents of the world's best thinking," these influences could not die out in the generation nearest them. For every writer some history of the Colony was the first instinct, and William Bradford holds the same relation to New England as Captain John Smith to Virginia— the racy, incisive, picturesque diction of the latter being a key- hole to their colonial life, as symbolical as the measured, restrained and solemn periods of the Puritan writer. Argument had become a necessity of life. ”

“ The wild grape, growing as profusely to-day on the Cape as two hundred years ago, is even more powerful, the subtle, delicious fragrance making itself felt as soon as one approaches land. The "fine, fresh smell like a garden," which Winthrop notes more than once, came to them on every breeze from the blossoming land. Every charm of the short New England summer waited for them. ”

“ Every country paper, every petty periodical, holds verse that in the Queen Anne period in literature would have given the author permanent place and name. All can rhyme, and many can rhyme melodiously. The power of words fitly set has made itself known, and a word has come to be judged like a note in music—as a potential element of harmony—a sound that in its own place may mean any emotion of joy or sorrow, hate or love. ”

“ English aims had passed beyond the bounds of England, and every English "squire who crossed the Channel to flesh his maiden sword at Ivry or Ostend, brought back to English soil, the daring temper, the sense of inexhaustable resources, which had bourn him on through storm and battle field." Such forces were not likely to settle into a passive existence at home. Action had become a necessity. Thoughts had been stirred and awakened once for all. Consciously for the few, unconsciously for the many, "for a hundred years past, men had been living in the midst of a spiritual revolution. ”

“ There can no peril chance to me so terrible, nor any kind of death so cruel, that shall not be much easier for me to abide, than to live so far separate from you."
Weakened by the long voyage and its perpetual hardships, and dismayed, if may be at the sadness and privations of what they had hoped might hold immediate comfort, she could not rally, and Anne Bradstreet's first experience of New England was over the grave, in which they laid one of the closest links to childhood and that England both had loved alike. ”

“ The poems had brought her honor in the old home and the new. The meditations involved no anxious laboring after a rhyme, no straining a metaphor till it cracked. They were natural thought naturally expressed and therefore worthless for any literary purpose, and as she wrote, the wail of the Preacher repeated itself, and she smiled faintly as the words grew under her pen: "There is no new thing under the sun, there is nothing that can be sayd or done, but either that or something like it hath been done and sayd before." ”

“ A dense and unbroken circle of woods must have surrounded the settlement, and cut off many glimpses of river and hill that to- day make the drives about Andover full of surprise and charm. Slight changes came in the first hundred years. The great mills at Lawrence were undreamed of and the Merrimack flowed silently to the sea, untroubled by any of mans' uses.
Today the hillsides are green and smooth. Scattered farms are seen, and houses outside the town proper are few, and the quiet country gives small hint of the active, eager life so near it. ”

“ He had travelled widely and knew men and manners, and into the exhortations and expoundings of his daily life, the unfoldings of the complicated religious experience demanded of every Puritan, must have crept many a reminiscence of old days, dear to the heart of Anne Bradstreet, who, no matter what theory she deemed it best to follow, was at heart, to the end of her life a monarchist. ”

“ Yet in all the ferment of old and new beliefs—the strange departures from a beaten track—the attitude always, not of those who have found, but of those who seek, there has ever been the promise of a better day. The pathos which underlies all record of human life is made plain, and a tender sadness is in the happiest lines. And this is the real story of New England. ”

“ The Puritan reign of terror for New England was over, its story to this generation seeming as incredible as it is shameful. Brutality is not quite dead even to-day, but there is cause for rejoicing that, for America at least, freedom of conscience can never again mean whipping, branding and torturing of unnamable sorts for tender women and even children. ”

“ Vane was defeated and Winthrop again made governor, his calm forbearance being the chief safety of the divided and unhappy colonists, who resented what they settled to be tyranny, and cast about for some means of redress. None was to be had. Exile, imprisonment and even death, awaited the most eminent citizens; Winthrop's entry into Boston was met by gloomy silence, and for it all, Welde and Symmes protested Anne Hutchinson to be responsible, and denounced her as a heretic and a witch. ”

“ Each man had his own thought, and was able to put it into strong words. No colony has ever known so large a proportion of learned men, there being more graduates of Cambridge and Oxford between the years 1630 and 1690 than it was possible to find in a population of the same size in the mother country. "In its inception, New England was not an agricultural community, nor a manufacturing community, nor a trading community; it was a thinking community—-an arena and mart for ideas—its characteristic organ being not the hand, nor the heart, nor the pocket, but the brain." ”

“ Symmes, a dogmatic and overbearing man, found himself often worsted by the quick wit of this woman, who silenced all objections, and who, with no conception of the rooted enmity she was exciting, told with the utmost freedom, past and present speculations and experiences. The long fasts, and continuous religious exercises, worked upon her enthusiast's temper, and excited by every circumstance of time and place, it is small wonder that she supposed a direct revelation had come to her, the nature of which Winthrop mentions in his History. ”

“ XLII. I have seen an end of all perfection (sayd the royall prophet) ; but he never sayd, I have seen an end of all sinning: what he did say, may be easily sayd by many; but what he did not say, cannot truly be uttered by any.
XLIII. Fire hath its force abated by water, not by wind; and anger must be alayed by cold words, and not by blustering threats.
XLIV. A sharp appetite and a thorough concoction, is a signe of an healthfull body; so a quick reception, and a deliberate cogitation, argues a sound mind. ”

“ It was the deacons and elders who ruled public affairs, always under direction of well-nigh supreme authority vested in the minister. There was reason for such faith in them. "The objects of much public deference were not unaware of their authority; they seldom abused it; they never forgot it. If ever men, for real worth and greatness, deserved such pre-eminence, they did; they had wisdom, great learning, great force of will, devout consecration, philanthropy, purity of life. For once in the history of the world, the sovereign places were filled by the sovereign men. ”

“ One would have thought the conflict with natural forces quite enough to absorb all superfluous energy, every fact of climate, soil and natural features being against them, but neither scanty harvests, nor Indian wars, nor devastating disease, had the power to long suppress this perpetual and unflinching self-discipline.
Unlike any other colony of the New World, the sole purpose and motive of action was an ideal one. The Dutch sought peltries and trade in general, and whereever they established themselves, at once gave tokens of material comfort and prosperity. ”

“ Boston owed its first settlement to its "sweet and pleasant springs," and Wood made it a large inducement to emigration, in his "New England's Prospect." "The country is as well watered as any land under the sun; every family or every two families, having a spring of sweet water betwixt them. It is thought there can be no better water in the world." New Englanders still hold to this belief, and the soldier recalls yet the vision of the old well, or the bubbling spring in the meadow that tantalized and mocked his longing in the long marches, or in the hospital wards of war time. ”

“ MEDITATIONS WHEN MY SOUL HATH BEEN REFRESHED WITH THE CONSOLATIONS WHICH THE WORLD KNOWES NOT. Lord, why should I doubt any more when thou hast given me such assured Pledges of thy Love? First, thou art my Creator, I thy creature; thou my master, I thy servant. ”

“ There were indications even in the first fervor of the embarkation, that even here some among them thought "every man upon his own," while greater need of unselfishness and self-renunciation had never been before a people. "Only by mutual love and help," and "a grand, patient, self-denial," was there the slightest hope of meeting the demands bound up with the new conditions, and Winthrop wrote—"We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities. ”

“ Their first summer was unutterably forlorn, the beauty and fertility that had seemed to promise to the sea-sad eyes a life of instant ease, bringing with it only a "horrible trail of homesickness, discord, starvation, pestilence and Indian hostility." No common purpose united them, as in the Northern Colony. Save for the leaders, individual profit had been the only ambition or intention. Work had no place in the scheme of life, and even when ship after ship discharged its load of immigrants matters were hardly mended. ”

“ But the keenest minds, no matter how vivid and beautiful their intelligence, were certain that neither man as a body, nor the world as a home, were anything but lack evils, ruined by the fall of Adam, and to be ignored and despised with every power and faculty. Faith in God came to be faith in "a microscopic and picayune Providence," governing the meanest detail of the elect's existence, and faith in man had no place in any scheme of life or thought. If a poem were written it came to be merely some transcription from the Bible, or an epitaph or elegy on some departed saint. ”

“ Even for the seventeenth there are countless infractions of law, and a study of court records would leave the impression of a reckless and utterly defiant community, did not one recall the fact that life was so hedged about with minute detail, that the most orderly citizen of this day would have been the disorderly one of that.
One resource, of entertainment, was always open to Puritan households. Hospitality was on a scale almost of magnificence, and every opportunity seized for making a great dinner or supper, the abundant good cheer of which was their strongest reminder of England. ”

“ The romantic school had its day, and its power and charm are uncomprehended by the reader of this generation. And the Lake poets, firmly as they held the popular mind, have no place now, save in the pages where a school was forgotten and nature and stronger forces asserted their power.
No poet has enduring place whose work has not been the voice of the national thought and life in which he has had part. Theology, politics, great questions of right, all the problems of human life in any age may have, in turn, moulded the epic of the period ”

“ That there is a God my Reason would soon tell me by the wondrous workes that I see, the vast frame of the Heaven and the Earth, the order of all things, night and day, Summer and Winter, Spring and Autumne, the dayly providing for this great houshold upon the Earth, the preserving and directing of All to its proper end. The consideration of these things would with amazement certainly resolve me that there is an Eternall Being. ”