Cut off by their intellectual asceticism from
any exertion of the imagination in literature, and denying themselves
all that side of life which at once develops and rhythmically restrains
the sense of earthly beauty, they compensated themselves by running
parallels between their own mission and that of the apostles,--a
likeness which was interchangeable at pleasure with the fancied
resemblance of their condition to that of the Israelites. When one
considers the remoteness of the field from their native shores, the
enormous energy needful to collect the proper elements for a population,
and to provide artificers with the means of work; the almost impassable
wildness of the woods; the repeated leagues of hostile Indians; the
depletions by sickness; and the internal dissensions with which they had
to struggle,--one cannot wonder that they invested their own unsurpassed
fortitude, and their genius for government and war, with the quality of
a special Providence. But their faith was inwoven in the most singular
way with a treacherous strand of credulity and superstition. Sometimes
one is impressed with a sense that the prodigious force by which they
subdued the knotty and forest-fettered land, and overcame so many other
more dangerous difficulties, was the ecstasy of men made morbidly strong
by excessive gloom and indifference to the present life. "When we are in
our graves," wrote Higginson, "it will be all one whether we have lived
in plenty or penury, whether we have died in a bed of downe or lockes of
straw.
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