The Pilgrims made the best of every thing—saw only the good of the land. Even the climate of New England did not lack encomiasts. Wood had been “carefully hatched,” yet in England disease sapped his life. While in America, he wrote: “Scarce do I know what belongs to a day’s sickness.”[754]
An English churchman, who had not Wood’s motive for liking New England, saw with different eyes: “The transitions from heat to cold are short, sudden, and paralyzing. We are sometimes frying, and at others freezing; and as some men die at their labor in the field of heat, so some in winter are frozen to death by the cold.”[755] No doubt.
“Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking of the frosty Caucasus?”
The Puritans saw New England as the refuge of the godly, and looking at it through the mirage of sentiment, its sky rivalled that of Italy in soft beauty. To the churchman it seemed a rugged wilderness in very deed. It was a difference of standpoint.
But mild or severe, the Pilgrims loved this adopted mother on whose breast they lay, and their settlements began to increase in number. A brood of eight little towns, or townlets, now nestled under the wings of the Massachusetts charter;[756] while Plymouth already began to think of equipping a new colony,[757] and annexing the Connecticut.
The western wilds were no longer tenantless, or what is equivalent to that, held only by prowling barbarians. The French, who had been hovering over the coast ever since their rout from L’Acadie, in 1613, by Sir Samuel Argall, had recently acquired Canada by purchase.[758] The wise statesmanship of Richelieu had bought from Charles I.—busy in a fatal attempt to enforce ceremonialism,
“Rending the book in struggles for the binding,”—
one of the finest provinces in the known world for fishing, masts, harbors.[759] Already the Latin provinces had begun to string a chain of citadels westward along the banks of the St. Lawrence and the borders of the lakes to the valley of the Mississippi,
——“toppling round the dreary west