able for the production of a
literature in New England than in the southern colonies. The free and
genial existence of the "Old Dominion" had no counterpart among the
settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have
been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a different
way of thinking. But their {334} intensity of character, their respect
for learning, and the heroic mood which sustained them through the
hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in
their own writings. If these are not so much literature as the raw
materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate in finding
interpreters among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has done
for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, Whittier,
Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and
romance over the lives of the founders of New England.

Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, quotes the following passage from one
of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of
Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual
intellectual event of the colony: "The question was often put unto our
predecessors, _What went ye out into the wilderness to see_? And the
answer to it is not only too excellent but too notorious to be
dissembled.~.~.~. We came hither because we would have our posterity
settled under the pure and full dispensations of the gospel, defended
by rulers that should be of ourselves." The New England colonies were,
in fact, theocracies. Their leaders were clergymen or laymen, whose
zeal for the faith was no whit inferior to that of the ministers
themselves. Church and State were one. The freeman's oath was only
administered to Church members, and there was no place in the social
system for unbelievers or {335} dissenters. The Pilgrim fathers
regarded their transplantation to the New World as an exile, and
nothing is more touching in their written records than the repeated
expressions of love and longing toward the old home which they had
left, and even toward that Church of England from which they had
sorrowfully separated themselves. It was not in any light or
adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea and the
wilderness. "This howling wilderness," "these ends of the earth,"
"these goings down of the sun," are some of the epithets which they
constantly applied to the land of their exile. Nevertheless they