Attending frequently upon meetings of the Company, and supervising its own business as well as his private affairs, all having in view what must then have been in the scale of the time a gigantic undertaking, full of vexations and embarrassments, Winthrop seizes upon a few days of crowded heart-strugglings to make his last visit at the dear homestead, and then to take of it his eternal farewell.  How lovingly and admiringly do we follow him on his way from London, taking his last view of those many sweet scenes which were thenceforward to embower in his memory all the joys of more than forty years!  He did not then know for what a rugged landscape, and for what uncouth habitations, he was to exchange those fair scenes and the ivy-clad and -festooned churches and cottages of his dear England.  His wife, for reasons of prudence, was to remain for a while with some of his children, beside his eldest son, and was to follow him when he had made fit preparation for her.  His last letters to her (and each of many was written as the last, because of frequent delays) after the embarkation of the company, are gems and jewels of a heart which was itself the pure shrine of a most fond and faithful love.  His leave-taking at Groton was at the end of February, 1630; his embarkation was on March 22.  The ships were weather-bound successively at Cowes and at Yarmouth, whence were written those melting epistles.  A letter which he wrote to Sir William Spring, one of the Parliamentary members from Suffolk, a dear religions friend of his, overflows with an ardor and intenseness of affection which passes into the tone and language of feminine endearment, and fashions passages from the Song of Solomon into prayers.  One sentence of that letter keeps sharp its lacerating point for the reader of to-day.  “But I must leave you all:  our farewells usually are pleasant passages; mine must be sorrowful; this addition of forever is a sad close.”  And it was to be forever.  Winthrop was never to see his native land again.  Many of his associates made one or more homeward voyages.  A few of them returned to resume their English citizenship in those troublous times which invited and exercised energies like those which had essayed to tame a wilderness.  But the great and good leader of his blessed exodus never found the occasion, we know not that he ever felt the prompting, to recross the ocean.  The purpose of his life and soul was a unit in its substance and consecration, and it had found its object.  For nineteen years, most of them as Governor, and always as the leading spirit and the recognized Moses of the enterprise, he was spared to see the planting and the building-up which subdued the wilderness and reared a commonwealth.  He had most noble and congenial associates in the chief magistrates of the other New-England colonies.  Bradford and Winslow of Plymouth, Eaton of New Haven, his own son and Haynes and Hopkins of Connecticut, and Williams of Providence Plantations, were all of them men of signal virtue.  They have all obtained a good report, and richly and eminently do they deserve it.  They were, indeed, a providential galaxy of pure-hearted, unspotted, heroic men.  There is a mild and sweet beauty in the star of Winthrop, the lustre of which asks no jealous or rival estimation.