cations upon the Turkish
Empire." Here surely was one colonial who was trying, in Cecil Rhodes's
words, to "think continentally!"

Furthermore, the leaders of those early colonies were in large measure
university men, disciplined in the classics, fit representatives of
European culture. It has been reckoned that between the years 1630 and
1690 there were in New England as many graduates of Cambridge and
Oxford as could be found in any population of similar size in the
mother country. At one time during those years there was in
Massachusetts and Connecticut alone a Cambridge graduate for every two
hundred and fifty inhabitants. Like the exiled Greeks in Matthew
Arnold's poem, they "undid their corded bales"--of learning, it is
true, rather than of merchandise--upon these strange and inhospitable
shores: and the traditions of Greek and Hebrew and Latin scholarship
were maintained with no loss of continuity. To the lover of letters
there will always be something fine in the thought of that narrow
seaboard fringe of faith in the classics, widening slowly as the
wilderness gave way, making its invisible road up the rivers, across
the mountains, into the great interior basin, and only after the Civil
War finding an enduring home in the magnificent state universities of
the West. Lovers of Greek and Roman literature may perhaps always feel
themselves pilgrims and exiles in this vast industrial democracy of
ours, but they have at least secured for us, and that from the very
first day of the colonies, some of the best fruitage of
internationalism. For that matter, what was, and is, that one Book--to
the eyes of the Protestant seventeenth century infallible and
inexpressively sacred--but the most potent and universal commerce of
ideas and spirit, passing from the Orient, through Greek and Roman
civilization, into the mind and heart of Western Europe and America?

"Oh, East is East, and West is West,
And never the twain shall meet,"

declares a confident poet of to-day. But East and West met long ago in
the matchless phrases translated from Hebrew and Greek and Latin into
the English Bible; and the heart of the East there answers to the heart
of the West as in water face answereth to face. That the colonizing
Englishmen of the seventeenth century were Hebrews in spiritual
culture, and heirs of Greece and Rome without ceasing to be Anglo-Saxon
in blood, is one of the marvels of the history of civilization, and it
is one