y less than two
centuries. And yet what unspeakable things are included in that brief
period! If we have made such vast strides and so rapid a development in
those few years of our national life, with the heterogeneous and
unmalleable materials with which we had to deal, converting the filth of
Europe into grass and flowers for the decoration of the republic, what
may we not achieve hereafter, when this dreadful war is over, and the
negro question is adjusted, and the sundered States are reunited, and
the Western wilderness is clothed with the glory of a perfect
cultivation, and the genius of the people, no longer trammelled by
Southern despotism, shall have free room to wing its flight over the
immeasurable future?

There will be no likeness, in any mirror of the past, to the American
civilization that is to be. New manners, customs, thinkings, literature,
art, and life, will mark our progress and attest the mission of the
nation. We are fast outgrowing the ideas and influences of that brave
company of Puritans out of whose loins our beginning proceeded; and
already each man goes alone, insular, self-reliant, and self-sustained.
We owe the Puritans a large debt, but it is altogether a pretty fiction
to call them the founders of American civilization. They helped to lay
in the foundation stones of that early society, and kept them together
by cementing them with their love of religious truth and liberty, so far
as they understood these primal elements of a state; and we are likewise
their debtors for the integrity which they put into their laws and
government. But it is too high a demand to claim for them that they were
the founders of the republic, and the originators of those great ideas
which are embodied in our institutions and literature.

They came to this country with no very enlarged notions, either of
religion or freedom, although they were perfectly sincere in their
professions of regard for both; and it was this very sincerity which
gave solidity and permanence to their colonies. We suppose we may repeat
what history has made notorious respecting them, that they were, both in
belief and civil practice, very narrow and limited in their
outlooks--by no means given to intellectual speculations--and with but
little faith in the intellect itself--which, indeed, was proscribed as a
sort of outlaw when it stood upon its own authority, outside the pale of
_their_ church. The religion which they established had its o