The conditions were much more favorable for the production of a literature in New England than in the southern colonies.  The free and genial existence of the “Old Dominion” had no counterpart among the settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a different way of thinking.  But their intensity of character, their respect for learning, and the heroic mood which sustained them through the hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in their own writings.  If these are not so much literature as the raw materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate in finding interpreters among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has done for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, Whittier, Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and romance over the lives of the founders of New England.

Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, quotes the following passage from one of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual intellectual event of the colony: 

“The question was often put unto our predecessors, What went ye out into the wilderness to see?  And the answer to it is not only too excellent but too notorious to be dissembled. . . .  We came hither because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full dispensations of the Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of ourselves.”  The New England colonies were, in fact, theocracies.  Their leaders were clergymen, or laymen whose zeal for the faith was no whit inferior to that of the ministers themselves.  Church and State were one.  The freeman’s oath was only administered to church members, and there was no place in the social system for unbelievers or dissenters.  The pilgrim fathers regarded their transplantation to the New World as an exile, and nothing is more touching in their written records than the repeated expressions of love and longing toward the old home which they had left, and even toward that Church of England from which they had sorrowfully separated themselves.  It was not in any light or adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea and the wilderness.  “This howling wilderness,” “these ends of the earth,” “these goings down of the sun,” are some of the epithets which they constantly applied to the land of their exile.  Nevertheless they had come to stay, and, unlike Smith and Percy and Sandys, the early historians and writers of New England cast in their lots permanently with the new settlements.  A few, indeed, went back after 1640—­Mather says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first “classis” or immigration were among them—­when the victory of the Puritanic party in Parliament opened a career for them in England, and made their presence there seem in some cases a duty.  The celebrated