re is no poetry in the darkness of the Puritan's creed nor in the
rigid rectitude of his morality. His surly boldness, his tough hold on
the real, his austere piety enforce respect, but do not allure
affection. The genial graces cannot bear company with ruthless bigotry
and Hebraic energy. Nor is there any poetry in the mere struggle for
existence, and the mean poverty that marked the outward life. The
Pilgrims were often pinched for food; they suffered in a bitter climate;
they lived in isolation. We think lightly of these things because we
cannot help imagining that they knew that they were founding a mighty
nation. But that knowledge was denied them. Generations of them sank
into nameless graves without any vision of the days when their
descendants should rise up and call them blessed. Nor is there any
inspiration in the measure of their outward success. Judged by their own
ideals, the Puritans failed. They would neither recognize nor approve
the civilization that has sprung from the seeds of their planting. They
tried to establish a theocracy; they stand in history as the heroes of
democracy. Alike in their social and religious aims they ignored
ineradicable elements in human nature. They attempted the impossible.
How then have their deeds become the source of song and story? Why all
the honor that we pay them? It is not because in danger, in sacrifice,
and in failure, they were stout-hearted. Many a freebooter or soldier of
fortune has been that. It is, as one said whose name I bear, "because
they were stout-hearted for an ideal--their ideal, not ours, of civil
and religious liberty. Wherever and whenever resolute men and women
devote themselves, not to material, but to spiritual ends, there the
world's heroes are made," and made to be remembered, and to become the
inspiration of poem and romance and noble daring.

Scratch a New Englander to-day, it is said, and you find the Puritan.
That is no less true of the poets than of the warriors and the men of
facts and figures. The New England poets derived their nourishment from
the deep earth of that wholesome past, into which the roots of all our
lives go down. The mystical and mediaeval side of Puritanism finds its
embodiment in Hawthorne; its moral ideals shine in Bryant; its
independency is incarnated in Emerson. Emerson is the type of the
nineteenth-century Puritan, in life pure, in temperament saintly, in
spirit detached from the earth, blazing a path for himself t