cerns of the parish, the merits of the minister, were the weightiest affairs; and a church reproof the heaviest calamity. The strifes of the parent country, though they sometimes occasioned a levy among the sons of the husbandmen, yet never brought an enemy within their borders; tranquillity was within their gates, and the peace of God within their hearts. No fears of midnight ruffians could disturb the sweetness of slumber; the best house required no fastening but a latch, lifted by a string; bolts and locks were unknown.

There was nothing morose in the Connecticut character. It was temperate industry enjoying the abundance which it had created. No great inequalities of condition excited envy, or raised political feuds; wealth could display itself only in a larger house and a fuller barn; and covetousness was satisfied by the tranquil succession of harvests. There was venison from the hills; salmon, in their season, not less than shad, from the rivers; and sugar from the trees of the forest. For a foreign market little was produced beside cattle; and in return for them but few foreign luxuries stole in. Even so late as 1713, the number of seamen did not exceed one hundred and twenty. The soil had originally been justly divided, or held as common property in trust for the public, and for new comers. Forestalling was successfully resisted; the brood of speculators in land inexorably turned aside. Happiness was enjoyed unconsciously; beneath the rugged exterior humanity wore its sweetest smile. There was for a long time hardly a lawyer in the land. The husbandman who held his own plough, and fed his own cattle, was the great inan of the age; no one was superior to the matron, who, with her busy daughters, kept the hum of the wheel incessantly alive, spinning and weaving every article of their dress. Fashion was confined within narrow limits; and pride, which aimed at no grander equipage than a pillion, could exult only in the common splendor of the blue and white linen gown, with short sleeves, coming down to the waist, and in the snow-white flaxen apron, which, primly starched and ironed, was worn on public days by every woman in the land. For there was no revolution except from the time of sowing to the time of reaping; from the plain dress of the week day to the more trim attire of Sunday.

Every family was taught to look upward to God, as to the Fountain of all good. Yet life was not sombre. The spirit of frolic mingled with innocence: religion itself sometimes wore the garb of gayety; and the annual thanksgiving to God was, from primitive times, as joyous as it was sincere. Nature always asserts her rights, and abounds in means of gladness.

The frugality of private life had its influence on public expenditure. Half a century after the concession of the charter, the annual expenses of the government did not exceed eight hundred pounds, or four thousand dollars; and the wages of the chief justice were ten shillings a day while on service. In each county a magistrate acted as judge of probate, and the business was transacted with small expense to the fatherless.

Education was always esteemed a concern of deepest interest, and there were common schools from the first. Nor was it long before a small college, such as the day of small things permitted, began to be established; and Yale owes its birth "to ten worthy fathers, who, in 1700, assembled at Branford, and each one, laying a few volumes on a table, said, I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony.'

But the political education of the people is due to the happy organization of towns, which here, as indeed throughout all New England, constituted each separate settlement a little democracy of itself. It was the natural reproduction of the system, which the instinct of humanity had imperfectly revealed to our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. In the ancient republics, citizenship had been an hereditary privilege. In Connecticut, citizenship was acquired by inhabitancy, was lost by removal. Each townmeeting was a little legislature, and all inhabitants, the affluent and more needy, the wise and the foolish, were members with equal franchises. There the taxes of the town were discussed and levied; there the village officers were chosen; there roads were laid out, and bridges voted; there the minister was elected, the representatives to the assembly were instructed. The debate was open to all; wisdom asked no favours; the churl abated nothing of his pretensions. Whoever reads the records of these village democracies, will be perpetually coming upon some little document of political wisdom, which breathes the freshness of rural legislation, and wins a disproportioned interest, from the justice and simplicity of the times. As the progress of society required exertions in a wider field, the public mind was quickened by associations that were blended with early history; and when Connecticut emerged from the quiet of its origin, and made its way into scenes where a new political world was to be created, the sagacity that had regulated the affairs of the village, gained admiration in the field and in council.

CHIVALRY AND PURITANISM.

FROM THE SAME.

HISTORIANS have loved to eulogize the manners and virtues, the glory and the benefits, of chivalry. Puritanism accomplished for mankind far more. If it had the sectarian crime of intolerance, chivalry had the vices of dissoluteness. The knights were brave from gallantry of spirit; the Puritans from the fear of God. The knights were proud of loyalty; the Puritans of liberty. The knights did homage to monarchs, in whose smile they beheld honour, whose rebuke was the wound of disgrace; the Puritans, disdaining ceremony, would not bow at the name of Jesus, nor bend the knee to the King of kings. Chivalry delighted in outward show, favoured pleasure, multiplied amusement, and degraded the human race by an exclusive respect for the privileged classes; Puritanism

bridled the passions, commanded the virtues of selfdenial, and rescued the name of man from dishonour. The former valued courtesy; the latter, justice. The former adorned society by graceful refinements; the latter founded national grandeur on universal education. The institutions of chivalry were subverted by the gradually-increasing weight, and knowledge, and opulence of the industrious classes; the Puritans, rallying upon those classes, planted in their hearts the undying principles of democratic liberty.

THE HUGUENOTS IN CAROLINA.

FROM THE SAME.

WHAT need of describing the stripes, the roastings by slow fires, the plunging into wells, the gashes from knives, the wounds from red-hot pincers, and all the cruelties employed by men who were only forbidden not to ravish nor to kill? The loss of lives cannot be computed. How many thousands of men, how many thousands of children and women, perished in the attempt to escape, who can tell? An historian has asserted that ten thousand perished at the stake, or on the gibbet and the wheel.

But the efforts of tyranny were powerless. Truth enjoys serenely her own immortality; and opinion, which always yields to a clearer conviction, laughs violence to scorn. The unparalleled persecution of vast masses of men for their religious creed, occasioned but a new display of the power of humanity; the Calvinists preserved their faith over the ashes of their churches, and the bodies of their murdered ministers. The power of a brutal soldiery was defied by whole companies of faithful men, that still assembled to sing their psalms; and from the country and the city, from the comfortable homes of wealthy merchants, from the abodes of an humbler peasantry, from the workshops of artisans, hundreds of thousands of men rose up, as with one heart, to bear testimony to the indefeasible, irresistible right to freedom of mind.

Every wise government was eager to offer a refuge to the upright men who would carry to other countries the arts, the skill in manufactures, and the wealth of France. Emigrant Huguenots put a new aspect on the north of Germany, where they filled entire towns and sections of cities, introducing manufactures before unknown. A suburb of London was filled with French mechanics; the prince of Orange gained entire regiments of soldiers, as brave as those whom Cromwell led to victory; a colony of them reached even the Cape of Good Hope. In our American colonies they were welcome everywhere. The religious sympathies of New England were awakened; did any arrive in poverty, having barely escaped with life?-the towns of Massachusetts contributed liberally to their support, and provided them with lands. Others repaired to New York; but the warmer climate was more inviting to the exiles of Languedoc, and South Carolina became the chief resort of the Huguenots. What though the attempt to emigrate was by the

law of France a felony? In spite of every precaution of the police, five hundred thousand souls escaped from their country. The unfortunate were more wakeful to fly than the ministers of tyranny to restrain....

Escaping from a land where the profession of their religion was a felony, where their estates were liable to be confiscated in favour of the apostate, where the preaching of their faith was a crime to be expiated on the wheel, where their children might be torn from them, to be subjected to the nearest Catholic relation-the fugitives from Languedoc on the Mediterranean, from Rochelle, and Saintange, and Bordeaux, the provinces on the Bay of Biscay, from St. Quentin, Poictiers, and the beautiful valley of Tour, from St. Lo and Dieppe, men who had the virtues of the English Puritans, without their bigotry, came to the land to which the tolerant benevolence of Shaftesbury had invited the believer of every creed. From a land that had suffered its king, in wanton bigotry, to drive half a million of its best citizens into exile, they came to the land which was the hospitable refuge of the oppressed; where superstition and fanaticism, infidelity and faith, cold speculation and animated zeal, were alike admitted without question, and where the fires of religious persecution were never to be kindled. There they obtained an assignment of lands, and soon had tenements; there they might safely make the woods the scene of their devotions, and join the simple incense of their psalms to the melodies of the winds among the ancient groves. Their church was in Charleston; and thither, on every Lord's day, gathering from their plantations upon the banks of the Cooper, and taking advantage of the ebb and flow of the tide, they might all regularly be seen, the parents with their children, whom no bigot could now wrest from them, making their way in light skiffs along the river, through scenes so tranquil, that silence was broken only by the rippling of oars, and the hum of the flourishing village that gemmed the confluence of the rivers.

NEW NETHERLANDS AND NEW YORK.

FROM THE SAME.

SOMBRE forests shed a melancholy grandeur over the useless magnificence of nature, and hid in their deep shades the rich soil which the sun had never warmed. No axe had levelled the giant progeny of the crowded groves, in which the fantastic forms of withered limbs, that had been blasted and riven by lightning, contrasted strangely with the verdant freshness of a younger growth of branches. The wanton grape-vine, seeming by its own power to have sprung from the earth, and to have fastened its leafy coils on the top of the tallest forest tree, swung in the air with every breeze, like the loosened shrouds of a ship. Trees might everywhere be seen breaking from their root in the marshy soil, and threatening to fall with the first rude gust; while the ground was strown with the

ruins of former forests, over which a profusion of wild flowers wasted their freshness in mockery of the gloom. Reptiles sported in the stagnant pools, or crawled unharmed over piles of mouldering trees. The spotted deer couched among the thickets; but not to hide, for there was no pursuer; and there were none but wild animals to crop the uncut herbage of the productive prairies. Silence reigned, broken, it may have been, by the flight of land-birds or the flapping of water-fowl, and rendered more dismal by the howl of beasts of prey. The streams, not yet limited to a channel, spread over sand-bars, tufted with copses of willow, or waded through wastes of reeds; or slowly but surely undermined the groups of sycamores that grew by their side. The smaller brooks spread out into sedgy swamps, that were overhung by clouds of mosquitoes; masses of decaying vegetation fed the exhalations with the seeds of pestilence, and made the balmy air of the summer's evening as deadly as it seemed grateful. Vegetable life and death were mingled hideously together. The horrors of corruption frowned on the fruitless fertility of uncultivated nature.

And man, the occupant of the soil, was wild as the savage scene, in harmony with the rude nature by which he was surrounded; a vagrant over the continent, in constant warfare with his fellow-man; the bark of the birch his canoe; strings of shells his ornaments, his record, and his coin; the roots of the forest among his resources for food; his knowledge in architecture surpassed both in strength and durability by the skill of a beaver; bended saplings the beams of his house; the branches and rind of trees its roof; drifts of forest leaves his couch; mats of bulrushes his protection against the winter's cold; his religion the adoration of nature; his morals the promptings of undisciplined instinct; disputing with the wolves and bears the lordship of the soil, and dividing with the squirrel the wild fruits with which the universal woodlands abounded....

And how changed is the scene from that on which Hudson gazed! The earth glows with the colours of civilization; the banks of the streams are enamelled with richest grasses; woodlands and cultivated fields are harmoniously blended; the birds of spring find their delight in orchards and trim gardens, variegated with choicest plants from every temperate zone; while the brilliant flowers of the tropics bloom from the windows of the greenhouse and the saloon. The yeoman, living like a good neighbour near the fields he cultivates, glories in the fruitfulness of the valleys, and counts with honest exultation the flocks and herds that browse in safety on the hills. The thorn has given way to the rosebush; the cultivated vine clambers over rocks where the brood of serpents used to nestle; while industry smiles at the changes she has wrought, and inhales the bland air which now has health on its wings.

And man is still in harmony with nature, which he has subdued, cultivated, and adorned. For him the rivers that flow to remotest climes mingle their waters; for him the lakes gain new outlets to the ocean; for him the arch spans the flood, and

science spreads iron pathways to the recent wilderness; for him the hills yield up the shining marble and the enduring granite; for him the forests of the interior come down in immense rafts; for him the marts of the city gather the produce of every clime, and libraries collect the works of genius of every language and every age. The passions of society are chastened into purity; manners are made benevolent by civilization; and the virtue of the country is the guardian of its peace. Science investigates the powers of every plant and mineral, to find medicines for disease; schools of surgery rival the establishments of the Old World. An active daily press, vigilant from party interests, free even to dissoluteness, watches the progress of society, and communicates every fact that can interest humanity; the genius of letters begins to unfold his powers in the warm sunshine of public favour. And while idle curiosity may take its walk in shady avenues by the ocean side, commerce pushes its wharves into the sea, blocks up the wide rivers with its fleets, and, sending its ships, the pride of naval architecture, to every clime, defies every wind, outrides every tempest, and invades every zone.

JOHN LOCKE AND WILLIAM PENN.

FROM THE SAME.

PENN, despairing of relief in Europe, bent the whole energy of his mind to accomplish the establishment of a free government in the New World. For that "heavenly end," he was prepared by the severe discipline of life, and the love, without dissimulation, which formed the basis of his charac

ter.

The sentiment of cheerful humanity was irrepressibly strong in his bosom; as with John Eliot and Roger Williams, benevolence gushed prodigally from his ever-flowing heart; and when, in his late old age, his intellect was impaired, and his reason prostrated by apoplexy, his sweetness of disposition rose serenely over the clouds of disease. Possessing an extraordinary greatness of mind, vast conceptions, remarkable for their universality and precision, and "surpassing in speculative endowments;" conversant with men, and books, and governments, with various languages, and the forms of political combinations, as they existed in England and France, in Holland, and the principalities and free cities of Germany, he yet sought the source of wisdom in his own soul. Humane by nature and by suffering; familiar with the royal family; intimate with Sunderland and Sydney; acquainted with Russel, Halifax, Shaftesbury, and Buckingham; as a member of the Royal Society, the peer of Newton and the great scholars of his age, he valued the promptings of a free mind more than the awards of the learned, and reverenced the single-minded sincerity of the Nottingham shepherd more than the authority of colleges and the wisdom of philosophers. And now, being in the meridian of life, but a year older than was Locke, when, twelve years before, he had framed a constitution for Carolina, the Quaker legislator

was come to the New World to lay the foundations of states. Would he imitate the vaunted system of the great philosopher? Locke, like William Penn, was tolerant; both loved freedom; both cherished truth in sincerity. But Locke kindled the torch of liberty at the fires of tradition; Penn at the living light in the soul. Locke sought truth through the senses and the outward world; Penn looked inward to the divine revelations in every mind. Locke compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as Hobbes had compared it to a slate, on which time and chance might scrawl their experience; to Penn, the soul was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine harmonies, like those musical instruments which are so curiously and perfectly framed, that, when once set in motion, they of themselves give forth all the melodies designed by the artist that made them. To Locke, "Conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions;" to Penn, it is the image of God, and his oracle in the soul. Locke, who was never a father, esteemed "the duty of parents to preserve their children to not be understood without reward and punishment;" Penn loved his children, with not a thought for the consequences. Locke, who was never married, declares marriage an aflair of the senses; Penn reverenced woman as the object of fervent, inward affection, made, not for lust, but for love. In studying the understanding, Locke begins with the sources of knowledge; Penn with an inventory of our intellectual trea

sures.

Locke deduces government from Noah and Adam, rests it upon contract, and announces its end to be the security of property; Penn, far from going back to Adam, or even to Noah, declares that "there must be a people before a government," and, deducing the right to institute government from man's moral nature, seeks its fundamental rules in the immutable dictates "of universal reason," its end in freedom and happiness. The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes; the doctrine of Fox and Penn, being but the common creed of humanity, forbids division, and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure; things are good and evil only in reference to pleasure and pain; and to "inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums, or nuts;" Penn esteemed happiness to lie in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the inquiry after the high-❘ est good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly, that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in ;" Penn, like Plato and Fenelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots, that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practised for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing but space, duration and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth, and virtue, and God. Locke

declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed "not so many men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not know what they contend for;" Penn likewise vindicated the many, but it was because truth is the common inheritance of the race. Locke, in his love of tolerance, inveighed against the methods of persecution as "Popish practices;" Penn censured no sect, but condemned bigotry of all sorts as inhuman. Locke, as an American lawgiver, dreaded a too numerous democracy, and reserved all power to wealth and the feudal proprietaries; Penn believed that God is in every conscience, his light in every soul; and therefore, stretching out his arms, he built-such are his own words" a free colony for all mankind." This is the praise of William Penn, that, in an age which had seen a popular revolution shipwreck popular liberty among selfish factions; which had seen Hugh Peters and Henry Vane perish by the hangman's cord and the axe; in an age when Sydney nourished the pride of patriotism rather than the sentiment of philan thropy, when Russel stood for the liberties of his order, and not for new enfranchisements, when Harrington, and Shaftesbury, and Locke, thought government should rest on property,-Penn did not despair of humanity, and, though all history and experience denied the sovereignty of the people, dared to cherish the noble idea of man's capacity for self-government. Conscious that there was no room for its exercise in England, the pure enthusiast, like Calvin and Descartes, a voluntary exile, was come to the banks of the Delaware to institute "THE HOLY EXPERIMENT."

WILLIAM THE THIRD.

FROM THE SAME.

THE character of the new monarch of Great Britain could mould its policy, but not its constitution. True to his purposes, he yet wins no sympathy. In political sagacity, in force of will, far superior to the English statesmen who environed him; more tolerant than his ministers or his parliaments, the childless man seems like the unknown character in algebra which is introduced to form the equation, and dismissed when the problem is solved. In his person thin and feeble, with eyes of a hectic lustre, of a temperament inclining to the melancholic, in conduct cautious, of a self-relying humour, with abiding impressions respecting men, he sought no favour, and relied for success on his own inflexibility and the greatness and maturity of his designs. Too wise to be cajoled, too firm to be complaisant, no address could sway his resolve. In Holland, he had not scrupled to derive an increase of power from the crimes of rioters and assassins; in England, no filial respect diminished

the energy of his ambition. His exterior was chilling; yet he had a passionate delight in horses and the chase. In conversation he was abrupt, speaking little and slowly, and with repulsive dryness; in the day of battle, he was all activity, and the highest energy of life, without kindling his passions, animated his frame. His trust in Providence was so connected with faith in general laws, that, in every action, he sought the principle which should range it on an absolute decree. Thus, unconscious to himself, he had sympathy with the people, who always have faith in Providence.

66

Do you dread death in my company?" he cried to the anxious sailors, when the ice on the coast of Holland had almost crushed the boat that was bearing him to the shore. Courage and pride pervaded the reserve of the prince who, spurning an alliance with a bastard daughter of Louis XIV., had made himself the centre of a gigantic opposition to France. For England, for the English people, for English liberties, he had no affection, indifferently employing the whigs, who found their pride in the revolution, and the tories, who had opposed his elevation, and who yet were the fittest instruments "to carry the prerogative high." One great passion had absorbed his breast-the independence of his native country. The harsh encroachments of Louis XIV., which, in 1672, had made William of Orange a revolutionary stadtholder, now assisted to constitute him a revolutionary king, transforming the impassive champion of Dutch independence into the defender of the liberties of Europe.

DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARQUETTE.

FROM THE SAME.

BEHOLD, in 1673, on the tenth day of June, the meek, single-hearted, unpretending, illustrious Marquette, with Joliet for his associate, five Frenchmen as his companions, and two Algonquins as guides, lifting their two canoes on their backs, and walking across the narrow portage that divides the Fox River from the Wisconsin. They reach the watershed;-uttering a special prayer to the immaculate Virgin, they leave the streams that, flowing onwards, could have borne their greetings to the castle of Quebec;-already they stand by the Wisconsin. "The guides returned," says the gentle Marquette, leaving us alone, in this unknown land, in the hands of Providence." France and Christianity stood in the valley of the Mississippi. Embarking on the broad Wisconsin, the discoverers, as they sailed west, went solitarily down the stream, between alternate prairies and hill-sides, beholding neither man nor the wonted beasts of the forest: no sound broke the appalling silence, but the ripple of their canoe, and the lowing of the buffalo. In seven days, "they entered happily the Great River, with a joy that could not be expressed;" and the two birch-bark canoes, raising their happy sails under new skies and to unknown breezes, floated down the calm magnificence of the ocean stream, over the broad, clear sand-bars, the resort of innumerable waterfowl,-gliding past

islets that swelled from the bosom of the stream, with their tufts of massive thickets, and between the wide plains of Illinois and Iowa, all garlanded with majestic forests, or checkered by island groves and the open vastness of the prairie.

About sixty leagues below the mouth of the Wisconsin, the western bank of the Mississippi bore on its sands the trail of men; a little footpath was discerned leading into a beautiful prairie; and, leaving the canoes, Joliet and Marquette resolved alone to brave a meeting with the savages. After walking six miles, they beheld a village on the banks of a river, and two others on a slope, at a distance of a mile and a half from the first. The river was the Mou-in-gou-e-na, or Moingona, of which we have corrupted the same into Des Moines. Marquette and Joliet were the first white men who trod the soil of Iowa. Commending themselves to God, they uttered a loud cry. The Indians hear; four men advance slowly to meet them, bearing the peace-pipe brilliant with many coloured plumes. "We are Illinois," said they,that is, when translated, “We are men;" and they offered the calumet. An aged chief received them at his cabin with upraised hands, exclaiming, 66 How beautiful is the sun, Frenchmen, when thou comest to visit us! Our whole village awaits thee; thou shalt enter in peace into all our dwellings." And the pilgrims were followed by the devouring gaze of an astonished crowd.

At the great council, Marquette published to them the one true God, their Creator. He spoke, also, of the great captain of the French, the governor of Canada, who had chastised the Five Nations and commanded peace; and he questioned them respecting the Mississippi and the tribes that possessed its banks. For the messengers, who announced the subjection of the Iroquois, a magnificent festival was prepared of hominy, and fish, and the choicest viands from the prairies.

After six days' delay, and invitations to new visits, the chieftain of the tribe, with hundreds of warriors, attended the strangers to their canoes; and, selecting a peace-pipe embellished with the head and neck of brilliant birds, and all feathered over with plumage of various hues, they hung round Marquette the mysterious arbiter of peace and war, the sacred calumet, a safeguard among the nations.

The little group proceeded onwards. "I did not fear death," says Marquette; "I should have esteemed it the greatest happiness to have died for the glory of God." They passed the perpendicular rocks, which wore the appearance of monsters; they heard at a distance the noise of the waters of the Missouri, known to them by its Algonquin name of Pekitanoni; and, when they came to the most beautiful confluence of rivers in the world,-where the swifter Missouri rushes like a conqueror into the calmer Mississippi, dragging it, as it were, hastily to the sea,-the good Marquette resolved in his heart, anticipating Lewis and Clarke, one day to ascend the mighty river to its source; to cross the ridge that divides the oceans, and descending a westerly flowing stream, to publish the gospel to all the people of this New World.