literature in New England than in the southern colonies. The free and
genial existence of the "Old Dominion" had no counterpart among the
settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have
been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a different
way of thinking. But their intensity of character, their respect for
learning, and the heroic mood which sustained them through the
hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in
their own writings. If these are not so much literature as the raw
materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate in finding
interpreters among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has done
for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, Whittier,
Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and
romance over the lives of the founders of New England.

Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, quotes the following passage from one
of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of
Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual
intellectual event of the colony:

"The question was often put unto our predecessors, _What went ye out
into the wilderness to see_? And the answer to it is not only too
excellent but too notorious to be dissembled. . . . We came hither
because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full
dispensations of the Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of
ourselves." The New England colonies were, in fact, theocracies.
Their leaders were clergymen, or laymen whose zeal for the faith was no
whit inferior to that of the ministers themselves. Church and State
were one. The freeman's oath was only administered to church members,
and there was no place in the social system for unbelievers or
dissenters. The pilgrim fathers regarded their transplantation to the