and quiet, had its days of
slaughter and conflagration, its tale of devoted love or cruel
treachery; while the city, now tumultuous with the pressure of
commerce, in its "day of small things," had its bombardment and
foreign army, and its handful of determined freemen, who achieved
prodigies of single handed valor. Now that men are daily learning the
worth of humanity, its hopes and its trials coming nearer home to
thought and affection; now that the complicated passions of refined
and artificial life are becoming less important than the broad, deep,
genuine manifestations of the common mind, we may hope for a bolder
and more courageous literature: we may hope to see the drama free
itself from sensualism and frivolity, and rise to the Shaksperian
dignity of true passion; while the romance will learn better its true
ground, and will create, rather than portray--delineate, rather than
dissect human sentiment and emotion.

The State of Maine is peculiarly rich in its historically romantic
associations. Settled as it was prior to the landing of the Pilgrims,
first under Raleigh Gilbert, and subsequently by Sir Ferdinando
Gorges, whose colony it is fair, in the absence of testimony, to infer
never left the country after 1616, but continued to employ themselves
in the fisheries, and in some commerce with the West Indies, up to the
time of their final incorporation with the Plymouth settlement. Indeed
the correspondence of Sir Richard Vines, governor of the colony under
Sir Ferdinando Gorges, with the Governor of Plymouth, leaves no doubt
upon this head; and it is a well known fact that the two settlements
of De Aulney and De la Tour at the mouths of the Penobscot and
Kennebec rivers, even at this early age, were far from being
contemptible, both in a commercial and numeric point of view. Added to
these was the handful of Jesuits at Mont Desert, and we might say a
colony of Swedes on the sea-coast, between the two large rivers just
named, the memory of which is traditional, and the vestiges of which
are sometimes turned up by the ploughshare. These people probably fell
beneath some outbreak of savage vengeance, which left no name or
record of their existence.

Subsequently to these was the dispersion of the Acadians, that
terrible and wanton piece of political policy, which resulted in the
extinction and denationalizing of a simple and pious people. The
fugitive Acadians found their way through a wilderness of forests,
suff