[362] the spell of the enchanter, Frost; the rushing river, with its graceful water-curves and white foam; and a steady murmur, low, deep voices of water, the softest, sweetest sound of Nature, blends with the sigh of the south wind in the pine-tops. But these hard-featured saints of the New Canaan ‘care for none of these things.’ The stout hearts which beat under their leathern doublets are proof against the sweet influences of Nature. They see only ‘a great and howling wilderness, where be many Indians, but where fish may be taken, and where be meadows for ye subsistence of cattle,’ and which, on the whole, ‘is a comfortable place to accommodate a company of God's people upon, who may, with God's blessing, do good in that place for both church and state.’ （Vide petition to the General Court, 1653.)
In reading the journals and narratives of the early settlers of New England nothing is more remarkable than the entire silence of the worthy writers in respect to the natural beauty or grandeur of the scenery amid which their lot was cast. They designated the grand and glorious forest, broken by lakes and crossed by great rivers, intersected by a thousand streams more beautiful than those which the Old World has given to song and romance, as ‘a desert and frightful wilderness.’ The wildly picturesque Indian, darting his birch canoe down the Falls of the Amoskeag or gliding in the deer-track of the forest, was, in their view, nothing but a ‘dirty tawnie,’ a ‘salvage heathen,’ and ‘devil's imp.’ Many of them were well educated,— men of varied and profound erudition, and familiar
