They see only "a great and howling wilderness, where be many Indians, but where fish may be taken, and where be meadows for ye subsistence of cattle," and which, on the whole, "is a comfortable place to accommodate a company of God's people upon, who may, with God's blessing, do good in that place for both church and state." (Vide petition to the General Court, 1653.) In reading the journals and narratives of the early settlers of New England nothing is more remarkable than the entire silence of the worthy writers in respect to the natural beauty or grandeur of the scenery amid which their lot was cast.

They designated the grand and glorious forest, broken by lakes and crossed by great rivers, intersected by a thousand streams more beautiful than those which the Old World has given to song and romance, as "a desert and frightful wilderness." The wildly picturesque Indian, darting his birch canoe down the Falls of the Amoskeag or gliding in the deer-track of the forest, was, in their view, nothing but a "dirty tawnie," a "salvage heathen," and "devil's imp." Many of them were well educated,--men of varied and profound erudition, and familiar with the best specimens of Greek and Roman literature; yet they seem to have been utterly devoid of that poetic feeling or fancy whose subtle alchemy detects the beautiful in the familiar.

Their very hymns and spiritual songs seem to have been expressly calculated, like "the music-grinders" of Holmes,-- "To pluck the eyes of sentiment, And dock the tail of rhyme, To crack the voice of melody, And break the legs of time." They were sworn enemies of the Muses; haters of stage-play literature, profane songs, and wanton sonnets; of everything, in brief, which reminded them of the days of the roistering cavaliers and bedizened beauties of the court of "the man Charles," whose head had fallen beneath the sword of Puritan justice.

Hard, harsh, unlovely, yet with many virtues and noble points of character, they were fitted, doubtless, for their work of pioneers in the wilderness.

Sternly faithful to duty, in peril, and suffering, and self-denial, they wrought out the noblest of historical epics on the rough soil of New England.