obscure; the object of their enterprise unostentatious; the theatre
of their exploits remote; how could they possibly be favorites of
worldly Fame--that common crier, whose existence is only known by
the assemblage of multitudes; that pander of wealth and greatness,
so eager to haunt the palaces of fortune, and so fastidious to the
houseless dignity of virtue; that parasite of pride, ever scornful
to meekness, and ever obsequious to insolent power; that heedless
trumpeter, whose ears are deaf to modest merit, and whose eyes are
blind to bloodless, distant excellence?

When the persecuted companions of Robinson, exiles from their native
land, anxiously sued for the privilege of removing a thousand
leagues more distant to an untried soil, a rigorous climate, and a
savage wilderness, for the sake of reconciling their sense of
religious duty with their affections for their country, few, perhaps
none of them, formed a conception of what would be, within two
centuries, the result of their undertaking. When the jealous and
niggardly policy of their British sovereign denied them even that
humblest of requests, and instead of liberty would barely consent to
promise connivance, neither he nor they might be aware that they
were laying the foundations of a power, and that he was sowing the
seeds of a spirit, which, in less than two hundred years, would
stagger the throne of his descendants, and shake his united kingdoms
to the centre. So far is it from the ordinary habits of mankind to
calculate the importance of events in their elementary principles,
that had the first colonists of our country ever intimated as a part
of their designs the project of founding a great and mighty nation,
the finger of scorn would have pointed them to the cells of bedlam
as an abode more suitable for hatching vain empires than the
solitude of a transatlantic desert.