country in which the rugged infancy of New England was raised. Such was the country which the Puritans were appointed to transpose into a meet residence of refinement and liberty. You know how they performed that duty. Your fathers have told you. From this hill, westward and southward, and eastward and northward, your eyes may see how they performed it. The wilderness and the solitary place were glad for them, and the desert rejoiced and blossomed as the rose. The land was a desolate wilderness before them; behind them, as the garden of Eden. How glorious a triumph of patience, energy, perseverance, intelligence, and faith! And then how powerfully and in how many ways must the fatigues, privations, interruptions, and steady advance and ultimate completion of that long day’s work have reacted on the character and the mind of those who performed it! How could such a people ever again, if ever they had been, be idle, or frivolous, or giddy, or luxurious! With what a resistless accession of momentum must they turn to every new, manly, honest, and worthy labor! How truly must they love the land for which they had done so much! How ardently must they desire to see it covered over with the beauty of holiness and the glory of freedom as with a garment! With what a just and manly self-approbation must they look back on such labors and such success; and how great will such pride make any people! There was another great work, different from this, and more difficult, more glorious, more improving, which they had to do, and that was to establish their system of colonial government, to frame their code of internal law, and to administer the vast and perplexing political business of the colonies in their novel and trying relations to England, through the whole Colonial Age. Of all their labors this was the grandest, the most intellectual, the best calculated to fit them for independence. Consider how much patient thought, how much observation of man and life, how much sagacity, how much communication of mind with mind, how many general councils, plots, and marshalling of affairs, how much slow accumulation, how much careful transmission of wisdom, that labor demanded. And what a school of civil capacity this must have proved to them who partook in it! Hence, I think, the sober, rational, and practical views and 19
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