" And Hawthorne speaks of the Puritan temperament as
"accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so
little." Yet, though they were not, as Winthrop says, "of those that
dreame of perfection in this world," they surely had vast hopes at
heart, and the fire of repressed imagination played around them and
before them as a vital and guiding gleam, of untold value to them, and
using a mysterious power in their affairs. They were something morbid in
their imaginings, but that this morbid habit was a chief source of their
power is a mistaken theory. It is true that their errors of imagination
were so closely knit up with real insight, that they could not
themselves distinguish between the two. Their religious faith, their
outlook into another life, though tinged by unhealthy terrorism, was a
solid, energetic act of imagination; but when it had to deal with
intricate tangles of mind and heart, it became credulity. That lurking
unhealthiness spread from the centre, and soon overcame their judgment
entirely. The bodeful glare of the witchcraft delusion makes this
fearfully clear. Mr. Upham, in his "Salem Witchcraft,"--one of the most
vigorous, true, and thorough of American histories, without which no one
can possess himself of the subject it treats,--has shown conclusively
the admirable character of the community in which that delusion broke
out, its energy, common-sense, and varied activity; but he points out
for us also the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in a matter
where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so closely as
in the witchcraft episode.
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