“ The traveller who to-day is desirous of visiting Whitehall may reach it by the delightful way of the beaches. Rounding the long curve of the First Beach, with its dressing-houses and tents, its crowd of carriages and swarms of gayly clad bathers, and climbing the hill at the far end, he will find himself directly above the lonely but far more beautiful Second Beach. Immediately before him, to the left, he will see Bishop Berkeley’s Rock, with its cliff-hung shelf, and beyond, the soft outlines of Sachuest Point, the narrow blue of the East Passage, and a strip of sunlit mainland. ”

“ The English company wanted a successful settlement, one to which they could themselves retreat if political and ecclesiastical oppression in the old country should prove too great for their endurance; and they well knew that prosperity depended upon order, sobriety, thrift, and piety. The splendid history and the moral leadership of New England in these three centuries have justified this painstaking, minute, even exasperating watch over the welfare of a colony far from the restraints of an old civilization, in peril from hostile savages and lawless adventurers on an inhospitable soil. ”

“ Even the suffrage qualification of church membership, which was required by our older sister Colony of Massachusetts, was omitted. Here in a New England wilderness a few pilgrims of the pilgrims, alive to the inspirations of the common law and of the British Constitution, so full of Christianity that they felt the great throb of its heart of human brotherhood, and so full of Judaism that they believed themselves in some special sense the people of God, made a written constitution, to be a supreme and organic law for their State. ”

“ The University with its manifold departments is a veritable hive of industry; the scales of Justice at the County Court House are tipping endlessly in favor of right against wrong; while the busy hum of the Winchester Arms and a hundred other mills, makes a music that dies not out.
Altogether, historic New Haven is a pleasant place in which to live, and its hospitality is as generous as are its gardens and its parks. ”

“ Lowell’s Letters, ii., 102.
THE early history of New England seems to many minds dry and unromantic. No mist of distance softens the harsh outlines, no mirage of tradition lifts events or characters into picturesque beauty, and there seems a poverty of sentiment. The transplanting of a people breaks the successions and associations of history. No memories of Crusader and Conqueror stir the imagination. Instead of the glitter of chivalry we have but the sombre homespun of Puritan peasants. ”

“ Beyond, the white beach glistens in the sun. And to the left, the road curves on past farmhouses and “cottages of gentility.” Away on the valley slope, the slow sails of a windmill revolve and flash, casting a flying shadow over the grass. A mile farther, and the road, making a turn, is joined to the right by what seems to be a farm-lane shut off by gates. This is the entrance to Whitehall. The house can be dimly made out from the road—a low, square building with a lean-to and a long, steep pitch of roof, fronting on a small garden overgrown with fruit-trees. ”

“ A milder intellectual climate, a temper less given to disputes about faith and works, election and reprobation, was needful to produce characters so broad, so moderate, and yet so firm, as Washington’s. New England did give birth to Franklin, in the very midst of Mathers and Sewalls; but he had to slip away to Philadelphia, in order to grow into his full stature as philanthropist and philosopher. The intolerance of New England deprived us, for more than a century, of the opportunity to produce genius and the gentler forms of heroism. ”

“ Sectarian animosities were the inevitable product of a mistaken emphasis put upon the form or utterance of truth, rather than upon truth itself; or, to put it differently, of a provincialism and narrowness of vision that made it impossible for the many to understand that truth is many-sided, that men are different temperamentally, that revelation is continuous and progressive, and that religion is not theology. Communities exist in New England where the old view still obtains, where sectarianism is as rampant as ever, where the clergyman is the social autocrat as well as the shepherd of souls. ”

“ Harwich, which has gone through the regular stages of whaling, codding, mackerel-fishing and salt-making, cultivates in turn the summer boarder, but somewhat quizzically. Retired sea-captains are not easily overawed even by golf-sticks, and retired sea-captains, in Harwich, are as thick as cranberries. Snuffing the brine, they pace their porches like so many quarter-decks and delight their auditors and themselves with marvellous recitals. The Cape has not proved friendly to manufactures in general. ”

“ The New England men will not go where it is not honorable to do an honest day’s work, and for that honest day’s work to claim an honest recompense. They never have done it, and they never will do it; and it was that potent fact, known to all men, that Manasseh Cutler had to urge in his private conversation and in his diplomatic work. When he said, ‘I am going away from New York, and my constituents are not going to do this thing,’ he meant exactly what he said. They were not going to any place where labor was dishonorable, and where workmen were not recognized as freemen. ”

“ Baptists; for, under the mild fostering of Roger Williams, Newport has become a city of refuge to religious malcontents of every persuasion. All the population, however, is not of like sobriety. A “rage of finery” distinguishes the aristocracy of the island, and silk-stockinged gentlemen, with scarlet coats and swords, silver-buckled shoes and lace ruffles, may be seen in abundance, exchanging stately greetings with ladies in brocades and hoops, as they pass to and fro between the decorous gambrel-roofed houses or lift the brazen knockers of the street-doors. ”

“ I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community.”
We honor old Rutland not only because she sent men to open the West, but because she sent her best, because she pitched the tone for the great West high.
But Rutland is not only “the cradle of Ohio,” pre-eminent as that distinction is in her history. She also—like the other towns on the hills round about her, and like every good old New England town—has her long line of simple local annals, well worthy the attention of the summer visitor from Boston or Chicago. ”

“ From the Rock where they landed we may follow their weary footsteps up the steep ascent of the first street, now named for Leyden, their city of refuge, and which may well be called the Via Sacra of Plymouth. Running back from the waterside to the foot of Burial Hill, and parallel to the Town Brook, it formed the centre of their daily toil, the scene of their early joys and sorrows. ”

“ Yet in spite of its municipal expansion and business enterprises, Cambridge is still pre-eminently the place where the lamp of learning is kept lighted. Though the college waxes great in numbers and its buildings multiply, and the jar of business invades the academic quiet, yet the purposes and habits of the scholar’s life still distinguish the community. ”

“ When we see at Plymouth the wooded glacial hillsides, under which the Pilgrims landed and established democracy in their wilderness, we may remember that their venture, though bolder, because earlier, than that of Bulkeley and Willard, who planted{244} the Concord colony, was yet but fifteen years in advance, and was made beside a friendly ocean, bearing succor and trade, and feeding them from its abundance. But the Concord colonists sat down in the gloomy shadow of the forest, amid trails of the savage and the wolf. ”

“ GYMNASIUM, HARVARD COLLEGE.
{238}
enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate with the Tories, by whom, or by whose fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the Episcopal Church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house. ”

“ Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jew, Caucasian and African, French Canadian and Irish, Italian and Portuguese, English and German, mingle in the school-room and learn the essential likeness of each to the other, their common and peculiar gifts, and their common duties to God and the State. No man in the community is so rich or aristocratic as to escape taxation for support of the school, even though his children may never darken the doors. No man in the community is so humble or so poor as to be debarred from sending his children to the highest as well as to the lowest grades. ”

“ In ante-bellum days, New England and the South were, perhaps, most unlike in their attitude toward manufacturing, and the difference was one that meant far more than a mere incident of difference of climate or a difference of opinion as to sectional or federal fiscal policy. The art of manufacturing, as New Englanders had practised it for generations before what is now known as the “factory system” developed, had been based on a universal recognition of the nobility of labor, the necessity for personal initiative, and the duty of thrift. Toil was considered honorable for men and women alike. ”

“ Few towns in New England possess more charm, whether of nature or society, than the towns in which her long-established institutions of learning have taken root, flourished, and dominated the life of the community. New Haven, Cambridge, and Providence are all cities now with a heterogeneous population and large manufacturing interests, and they each contain thousands of inhabitants to whom Harvard, Yale, and Brown are of as little practical benefit or concern as if they were situated in remote Hawaii or Porto Rico. ”

“ The shifty sand-bars of the Back Side have caught, twisted and broken the hulls of innumerable craft. One gale of wind wrecked eighteen vessels between Race Point, at the extremity of the Cape, and Highland Light. The average width of our crooked peninsula is six miles, but at Truro it narrows to half that distance. Across this strip the storms whirl the flinty sand, until the humblest cottage may boast of ground-glass window-panes. The coast outline is ever changing and the restless dunes show the fantastic carvings of the wind. ”

“ The Harvard life and spirit and teaching are all adapted to lead young men to the love and service of truth and to send them out to a ministry as wide and varied as the needs of humanity. The influence of the scholars and teachers and administrators that have been drawn into the service of the college is paramount, even if it is unconsciously{227} exercised and felt, in the community about the college. Here have always been—inevitable in a town which is the resort of the chosen youth of the country—a healthy, wholesome independence of spirit and a high-minded earnestness. ”

“ The ploughed fields are as white with sand as so many squares of beach, and the sea-tang is strong in the air. Accustomed, before their harbor failed them, to depend chiefly upon the sea for subsistence, the people of Truro now find it no easy matter to wrest a living from what they have of land. ”

“ In the ante-railroad days, Cheapside, at the head of Pocumtuck River navigation, was a thriving business village, with large imports of foreign wet and dry goods, and large exports of lumber, woodenware and brooms; Deerfield was long famous for its stall-fed beef, as many a New York and Boston epicure did testify; but the advent of the iron horse soon brought about the departure of the fall boat, and the passing of the stall-fed ox. The old town is no longer a centre of political power, or of trade and manufactures. ”

“ The “town-house,” or town-hall, of the New England town or village, in its architecture, is a modern structure, often as simple, unpretentious, and unornamented as the “meeting-house” near which it usually stands on the village green or “town common.” It is the arena wherein rich and poor, educated and illiterate, wise and foolish, meet, at least annually, and as much oftener as occasion demands, to decide those questions of Home Rule which are most vital to all concerned. ”

“ The changes of population and occupation have been almost as great as of surface. The blue-jacketed sailor was then a figure as familiar in the streets as is now the Italian or the Chinese; and the long wharves, then lined with great vessels, two or three deep, and fragrant with spicy Oriental odors, are now shortened, reduced, and given over to tugs and coasters. Boston is still the second commercial port in the country; but its commerce is mainly coast-wise or European only, and the picturesque fascination of the India trade has passed away. ”

“ On the southern slope, therefore, of Rutland’s highest hill the fine hospital now stands; and until people outgrow the foolish notion that a State must have all its State institutions within its own borders,—until Massachusetts knows that North Carolina is a better place for consumptives than any town of her own,—there could not be a wiser choice. The town is so near to Worcester, and even to Boston, that its fine air, broad outlook and big hotel draw to it hundreds of summer visitors ”