If it is objected that the young and lovely are seldom accused of any witchcraft except that of bewitching hearts, we answer, that of those who were actually accused, many were young; and those who maintained a firm integrity against the overwhelming power of the delusion of the period must have possessed an intellectual beauty which it would be vain to endeavor to portray.
This imperfect effort is submitted with much diffidence, to the indulgence of the courteous reader.
THE WITCH OF NEW ENGLAND.
CHAPTER I.
"Ay, call it holy ground,
The soil where first they trod:
They have left unstained what there they found,—
Freedom to worship God."
New England scenery is said to be deficient in romantic and poetic associations. It is said that we have no ruins of ancient castles, frowning over our precipices; no time-worn abbeys and monasteries, mouldering away in neglected repose, in our valleys.
It is true that the grand and beautiful places in our natural scenery are not marred by the monuments of an age of violence and wrong; and our silent valleys retain no remnant of the abodes of self-indulgent and superstitious devotion; but the descendant of the Pilgrims finds, in many of the fairest scenes of New England, some memento to carry back the imagination to those heroic and self-sacrificing ancestors. His soul is warmed and elevated when he remembers that devoted company, who were sustained amid hardship and every privation, on the trackless ocean, and in the mysterious and appalling solitudes of the forest, by a firm devotion to duty, and an all-pervading sense of the immediate presence of God.