any shade or degree would seem to have been made by any member of Winthrop’s family; his gentle, meek-hearted, but most heroic and high-souled wife, being, from first to last, his most cordial sympathizer and ally.  We next find him entering into the decisive “Agreement,” at Cambridge, with eleven other of the foremost adventurers to New England, which pledged them “to inhabit and continue there.”  It was only after most protracted, and, we may be sure, most devout deliberation, that the great decision was made, which involved the transfer of the patent, the setting up of a self-governing commonwealth on the foreign soil, and the committal of those who were to be its members to a life-long and exacting undertaking, from which there were to be no lookings-back.  A day was appointed for the company to meet, on which two committees were chosen, to weigh and present with full force, respectively, the reasons for a removal, and the reasons against it.  The “show of hands,” when these committees reported, fixed the purpose of the company on what they did not hesitate to believe was the leading of Providence.

From that moment we find Winthrop busy with cares and efforts of the most exacting character, drawing upon all his great energies, and engaging the fondest devotion of his manly and Christian heart.  He gave himself, without stint or regret, with an unselfish and supreme consecration, to the work, cherishing its great aim as the matter of his most earnest piety, and attending to its pettiest details with a scrupulous fidelity which proved that conscience found its province there.  We seem almost to be made spectators of the bustle and fervor of the old original Passover scenes of the Hebrew exodus.  It is refreshing to pause for a moment over a touch of our common humanity, which we meet by the way.  Winthrop in London “feeds with letters” the wife from whom he was so often parted.  In one of them he tells her that he has purchased for her the stuff for a “gowne” to be sent by the carrier, and he adds, “Lett me knowe what triminge I shall send for thy gowne.”  But Margaret, who could trust her honored husband in everything else, was a woman still, and must reserve, not only the rights of her sex, but the privilege of her own good taste for the fitnesses of things.  So she guardedly replies,—­in a postscript, of course,—­“When I see the cloth, I will send word what triminge will serve.”  In a modest parenthesis of another letter to her, dated October 29, 1629, he speaks of himself, as if all by the way, as “beinge chosen by ye Company to be their Governor.”  The circumstances of his election and trust, so honorable and dignified, are happily told with sufficient particularity on our own Court Records.  Governor Cradock, his honored predecessor, not intending immediate emigration, put the proposition, and announced the result which gave him such a successor.