making no effort to comprehend the system of the world. Life itself there, is but a fine dream; and death is only a scattering of the garlands, a hushing of the music, a putting out of the lights of a midsummer night’s feast. You would not look there for freedom, for morality, for true religion, for serious reflections. The destiny of the most of Europe was different. Vast forests covering half a continent, rapid and broad rivers, cold winds, long winters, large tracts unsusceptible of cultivation, snow-clad mountains on whose tops the lightning plays impassive,—this was the world that fell to their lot. And hence partly, that race is active, laborious, curious, intellectual, full of energy, tending to freedom, destined to freedom, but not yet all free. I cannot now pause to qualify this view, and make the requisite discriminations between the different States of that quarter of the world. To the tempest-tossed and weather-beaten, yet sanguine and enthusiastic spirits who came hither, New England hardly presented herself at first in all that ruggedness and sternest wildness which nature has impressed indelibly upon her. But a few summers and winters revealed the whole truth. They had come to a country fresh from the hand of nature, almost as on the day of creation, covered with primeval woods, which concealed a soil not very fruitful and bearing only the hardier and coarser grains and grasses, broken into rocky hills and mountains sending their gray summits to the skies, the upland levels, with here and there a strip of interval along a pleasant river, and a patch of saltmarsh by the side of the sea,—a country possessing and producing neither gold, nor diamonds, nor pearls, nor spices, nor opium, nor bread-fruit, nor silks, nor the true vine,—to a long and cold winter, an uncertain spring, a burning summer, and autumn with his fleecy clouds and bland southwest, red and yellow leaf and insidious disease;—such was the ungenial heaven beneath which their lot was cast; such was New England, yielding nothing to idleness, nothing to luxury, but yet holding out to faith and patience and labor, freedom and skill, and public and private virtue,—holding out to these the promise of a latter day afar off, of glory and honor and rational and sober enjoyment. Such was the 18
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