CAMBRIDGE
By SAMUEL A. ELIOT
“There is no place like it, no, not even for taxes.”
Lowell’s Letters, ii., 102.
THE early history of New England seems to many minds dry and unromantic. No mist of distance softens the harsh outlines, no mirage of tradition lifts events or characters into picturesque beauty, and there seems a poverty of sentiment. The transplanting of a people breaks the successions and associations of history. No memories of Crusader and Conqueror stir the imagination. Instead of the glitter of chivalry we have but the sombre homespun of Puritan peasants. Instead of the castles and cathedrals on which time has laid a hand of benediction we have but the rude log meeting-house and schoolhouse. Instead of Christmas merriment the voice of our past brings to us only the noise of axe and hammer, or the dreary droning of Psalms. It seems bleak, and destitute of poetic inspiration; at once plebeian and prosaic.
But I cannot help feeling that if we look beneath the uncouth exterior we shall find in New England history much idealism, much that can inspire noble daring and feed the springs of romance. Out of the hard soil of the Puritan thought, out of the sterile rocks of the New England conscience, spring flowers of poetry. This story of the planting of Cambridge has—if I might linger on it—a wealth of dramatic interest, not indeed in its antiquity,—it is but a story of yesterday,—but in the human associations that belong to it and the patriotic memories it stirs. The Cambridge dust is eloquent of the long procession of saints and sages, scholars and poets, whose works and words have made the renown of the place. First the Puritan chiefs of Massachusetts; then the early scholars of the budding commonwealth; then the Tory gentry who made the town in the days before the Revolution the centre of a lavish hospitality, and who maintained a happy social life of which the memories still linger in the beautiful homes which they left behind them; then the patriot
army surging about Boston in the exciting year of the siege, with the inspiring traditions of what Washington and Warren and Knox and Greene and the rest did and said; and finally the later associations of our great scholars and men of letters, chief of whom we rank Lowell and Holmes and Longfellow, whose lives were rooted deep in the Cambridge soil and whose dust there endears the sod.
The first figures on our Cambridge stage are those of the leaders of the Massachusetts colony. While Boston was clearly marked for prominence in the colony because of its geographical position, there was not at first the intention to make it the seat of government. It was too open to attack from the sea; a position farther inland could be more easily defended, not indeed from the Indians, but from the enemy most to be dreaded,—the war-ships of an irate and hostile motherland. Accordingly Governor John Winthrop and his assistants, shortly after the planting of Boston, journeyed in the shallop of the ship in which they had come from England, four miles up the Charles River behind Boston until they came to a meadow gently sloping to the riverside, backed by rounded hills and protected by wide-spreading salt marshes. There on the 28th of December, 1630, they landed and fixed the seat of their government. To quote the old chronicle:
