"Your claims I neither blame nor make light of. I know what their foundation is better than you do yourself. Only dismiss illusions, and accept realities, which do not yield to them even in charm to the imagination. When you know the ground under your feet, you will stand more quietly as well as more firmly. You will understand then that the silence of the New-Englander in regard to his extraction is not indifference, but security. Nowhere is the memory of ancestry so sacredly cherished as in New England, nowhere so humbly. What are we in presence of those majestic memories? We may lead our happy humdrum lives; may fulfil creditably our easy duties; we may plant and build and legislate for those who come after us; but it will still be to these great primitive figures that our descendants will look back; it will still be the debt owed there that will pledge the living generation to posterity.
"John Westlake, your first paternal ancestor in New England had nothing in common with the Puritan leaders. You are well informed there. He came over to seek his fortune. They came to prepare the destinies of a nation. He had nothing to do with them, except in being one of those they worked for. He came when the country was ready for him. His motive was a reasonable one. I shall not impugn it; but it tells of the roturier. The founding of states is an aristocratic tendency. He was a respectable ancestor. I have more than one such of my own. I owe to them the sedate mind which permits me to give myself to my own affairs, without feeling any responsibility about those of the world. But these are not the men who ennoble their descendants in perpetuity. If your breast knows the secret suggestions of lineage, these promptings are not from John Westlake. You must go back to our heroic age to find yours."
"I should be very glad to find myself in an heroic age," said Westlake, with a slight laugh, followed by a heavy sigh. "I feel as if I might have something to do there. But this thought never yet took me back to the Puritans: the battle-field is the hero's place, as I imagine the hero. They, I have understood, were especially men of peace. Is it not one of their first titles to honor?"
"The office of the hero is to create, to organize, to endow;—works of peace which incidentally require him to suppress its disturbers. The heroes have always been men of peace—its winners and maintainers for those who can only enjoy it—from Hercules down, that first great overthrower of oppressions and founder of colonies.
"To the age I call on you to date from—that of the imagining and founding a new England, a renovated world—belongs the brightest and dearest of English heroic names: the name whose associations of valor and tenderness, of high-heartedness and humility are as fresh now as when the love of the noble first canonized it. It is not without good reason that the name of Philip Sidney is a household word throughout New England, held in traditional affection and reverence. He was one of the first to project a new state beyond the seas, in which the simplicity and loyalty of primitive manners were to be restored, and the true Christian Church revived. He turned from these hopes only because he felt that he owed himself to Europe as long as an effort for the vindication of human rights upon its soil was possible. It was not love of war that led him to his fate in the Netherlands. He was not to be misled by false glory. In his Defence of Poesy he makes it a reproach to History, that 'the name of rebel Cæsar, after a thousand six hundred years, still stands in highest honor.' The peace-loving Burleigh, when the expedition in which Sidney fell was setting forth, wrote,—deprecating the reproach of lukewarmness,—that he 'should hold himself a man accursed, if he did not work for it with all the powers of his heart, seeing that its ends were the glory of God and the preservation of England in perpetual tranquillity.'
"'Nec gladio nec arcu' was the motto of Thomas Dudley, Harry's first ancestor in this country. He was a man of peace. But he offered his life to the same cause for which Philip Sidney laid down his,—drawing the sword for it in France, as Sidney had done ten years before in Flanders. He was reserved to aid in carrying out the other more effectual work which Sidney had designed, but from which his early death withdrew him.
"I am not telling you of Harry's ancestor for Harry's sake. You have your own part in all this, Westlake. When Reginald and Harry met and loved each other, blood spoke to blood.
"How many descendants do you suppose there are now from Governor Thomas Dudley's forty grandchildren? Hardly a family of long standing in New England but counts him among its ancestors; hardly a State of our Union into which some of that choice blood has not been carried, with other as precious.
"New England is not limited to that little northeastern corner. Our older country, 'that sceptred isle, that earth of majesty,' did not send forth the happiest of its 'happy breed of men' to found a world no wider than its own: wherever the descendants of those great pioneers set up their home, they plant a new New England.
"Do you know how their regenerate Transatlantic country presented itself to its early projectors? The most sanguine of us do not paint its future more brightly now than it was imaged in 1583.