joyous, but grievous; to both it is all made up over and over again by a more exceeding weight of glory. Look now, passing from the sufferings, to the gigantic labors of our Colonial Age, and calculate their influence on those who performed them. The first great work of the earlier generations of New England was to reclaim the country, to fit it for the susten- tation of life from day to day, from season to season, and thus to become the abode of an intellectual and social civilization advancing indefinitely. This is the first great work of all nations, who begin their existence in a country not before the residence of cultivated man. The nature of this work,—the ease and difficulty of performing it depending of course on the great natural characteristics of the region,—its fertility, its even or uneven surface, the quality, as well as the abundance or scarcity of its products, the brightness and dryness, or gloom and moisture of its skies, its cold or hot temperature, and the like,—the nature of this first and severest of the herculean labors of nations, perhaps quite as much as any other cause, perhaps as much as all other causes, affects the moral and mental character and habits of the people which have it to do. It has been maintained, and with great ingenuity, that the whole subsequent career of a nation has taken impulse and direction, from the circumstances of physical condition in which it came first into life. The children of the luxurious East opened their eyes on plains, whose fertility a thousand harvests could not exhaust, renewing itself perpetually from the bounty of a prodigal nature, beneath bright suns, in a warm, balmy air, which floated around them like music and perfumes from revels on the banks of rivers by moonlight. “Every blast shook spices from the leaves, and every month dropped fruits upon the ground.” “The blessings of nature were collected, and its evils extracted and excluded.” Hence the immemorial character of a part of the tribes of Asia. They became indolent, effeminate, and timorous. Steeped in sensual enjoyments, the mind slept with the body; or if it awoke, unlike the reasoning, speculative, curious, and energetic intellect of Europe, it reposed in reverie; it diffused itself in long contemplation, musing rather than thinking, reading human destiny in the stars, but 17
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