The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 7.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

---

[257] of the matter, the advance guard and forlorn hope of Christendom in its contest with the bad angel. The New World, into which they had so valiantly pushed the outposts of the Church militant, was to them, not God's world, but the Devil's. They stood there on their little patch of sanctified territory like the gamekeeper of Der Freischutz in the charmed circle; within were prayer and fasting, unmelodious psalmody and solemn hewing of heretics ‘before the Lord in Gilgal’ without were ‘dogs and sorcerers,’ red children of perdition, Powah wizards, and ‘the foul fiend.’ In their grand old wilderness, broken by fair, broad rivers and dotted with loveliest lakes, hanging with festoons of leaf, and vine, and flower, the steep sides of mountains whose naked tops rose over the surrounding verdure like altars of a giant world,— with its early summer greenness and the manycol-ored wonder of its autumn, all glowing as if the rainbows of a summer shower had fallen upon it, under the clear, rich light of a sun to which the misty day of their cold island was as moonlight,— they saw no beauty, they recognized no holy revelation. It was to them terrible as the forest which Dante traversed on his way to the world of pain. Every advance step they made was upon the enemy's territory. And one has only to read the writings of the two Mathers to perceive that that enemy was to them no metaphysical abstraction, no scholastic definition, no figment of a poetical fancy, but a living, active reality, alternating between the sublimest possibilities of evil and the lowest details of mean mischief; now a ‘tricksy spirit,’ disturbing