But roses will not always last.”
Isaac Johnson survived the beautiful victim but a few weeks,[695] then he followed her to immortality through the grave.
“He tried
To live without her, liked it not, and died,”
said Mather, quaintly.[696] Winthrop, through his tears, wrote his assistant’s epitaph: “He was a holy man and wise, and died in sweet peace.”[697]
And now the mortality was fearful. Eighty of Endicott’s colonists had been buried ere the coming of Winthrop;[698] in the summer and autumn succeeding his arrival over two hundred died.[699] Death reaped its hecatombs and battened on corpses. The Pilgrims wailed out their grief in God’s ear, and kept fasts and appointed days of humiliation. But He “who doeth all things well” had his own purpose to subserve, and his hand was not stayed from smiting till the chill December skies mantled the earth with snow.[700]
Early in September the colonists determined to desert the pestilential river banks; a few went back to Salem, some paused at Charleston; others, led by Winthrop, planted themselves on that neck of land which is now called Boston.[701]
Ere long this peninsula came to be thought the fittest site for the erection of a colonial capital, and the 17th of September, 1630, was formally set apart as the date of its settlement.[702] The spot was then called Shawmut,[703] and it was picturesquely seated on a surface which swelled into rising grounds of considerable height, which have since become famous as Copp’s hill, Fort hill, and Beacon hill.[704] Rome sits upon seven hills; Boston is a trimountain city.
Why was it called Boston? Because Boston in England, a prominent town in Lincolnshire, some five score miles north of London, had played no inconsiderable part in the drama of this colonization, giving to the enterprise some of its chiefest pillars, among others, Dudley, and Bellingham, and Leverett, and Coddington.[705] The grateful Pilgrims thought that they owed the old English city a recognition and a tribute; so they gave to their capital the familiar name of Boston.[706]
Shawmut had an occupant previous to its hasty adoption by the deserters from Cambridge. William Blackstone, who had come over with Endicott, found himself cramped even in sparsely-settled Salem; so he pushed on to Shawmut neck and became sole proprietor of the whole peninsula, which was afterwards bought of him. Here he lived ten years, and saw the foundations of society laid. He was an eccentric character; and though an ordained clergyman of the English church, he had Puritan proclivities. As he had been pinched at home by conformity laws, he had exiled himself that he might secure elbow-room for his sentiments. But he loved liberty so well that he never would unite with the New England church. “No, no,” he always replied, when solicited to do so, “I came from England because I did not like the lord-bishops; and I cannot join you, because I would not be under the lord brethren.”[707]