I OFTEN fancy John Alden, and others, too, among his companions of kindly fame, wandering down the long Plymouth beach and murmuring to themselves thoughts like these. And I like to look in the annals of the gentle Pilgrims and the sterner Puritans for any pages where one may find muffled for a moment the strain of high emprise which wins our awe and our praise, but not so surely our love, and gain access on their more human side to the men and women who lived the noblest romance in all history.

So one comes on the story of the Lady Arbella, and her love and death, with the sweet surprise one has in finding a fragile flower among granite ledges. So the Baby Peregrine’s velvet cheek has the unconscious caress of every mother who thinks of him rocked to sleep in his rough cradle by the sounding sea. So the thought deals tenderly with Dorothy Bradford, who crossed the mighty darkness of the deep only to fall overboard from the “Mayflower,” and be drowned in harbor, and would fain reap some harvest of romance in the coming over sea, three years afterward, of Mrs. Southworth, with her young sons, Constant and Thomas, to marry the Governor, who had loved her as Alice Carpenter lang syne. And so the story[17]
[18]
[19] of John Alden’s courtship is read as if we had found some human beings camped in the midst of demigods.

Certainly Miles Standish was not of the demigods, if he was of the heroes. No Puritan ascetic he, by nature or belief. One might imagine him some soul that failed to find incarnation among the captains and pirates of the great Elizabeth’s time, the Raleighs and Drakes and Frobishers, and who, coming along a hundred years too late, did his best to repair the mistake. A choleric fellow, who had quarrelled with his kin, and held himself wronged by them of his patrimony; of a quarrelsome race, indeed, that had long divided itself into the Catholic Standishes of Standish and the Protestant Standishes of Duxbury; a soldier who served the Queen in a foreign garrison, and of habits and tastes the more emphasized because he was a little man; supposed never to have been of the same communion as those with whom he cast in his lot,—it is not easy to see the reason of his attraction to the Pilgrims in Holland. Perhaps he chose his wife, Rose, from among them, and so united himself to them; if not that, then possibly she herself may have been inclined to their faith, and have drawn him with her; or it may have been that his doughty spirit could not brook to see oppression, and must needs espouse and champion the side crushed by authority. For the rest, at the age of thirty-five the love of adventure was still an active passion with him. That he was of quick, but not deep affections is plain from the swiftness with which he would fain have consoled himself after the death of Rose, his wife; and, that effort failing, by his sending to England for his wife’s sister Barbara, as it is supposed, and marrying her out of hand. That he was behind the spirit of the movement with which he was connected may be judged by his bringing home and setting up the gory head of his conquered foe; for although he was not alone in that retrograde act, since he only did what he had been ordered to do by the elders, yet the holy John Robinson, the inspirer[21]
[22]
[23] and conscience of them all, cried out at that, “Oh that he had converted some before he killed any!” Nevertheless, that and other bloody deeds seem to have been thoroughly informed with his own satisfaction in them. His armor, his sword, his inconceivable courage, his rough piety, that “swore a prayer or two,”—all give a flavor of even earlier times to the story of his day, and bring into the life when certain dainties were forbidden, as smacking of Papistry, a goodly flavor of wassail-bowls, and a certain powerful reminiscence of the troops in Flanders.

That such a nature as the fiery Captain’s could not exist without the soothing touch of love, could not brook loneliness, and could not endure grief, but must needs arm himself with forgetfulness and a new love when sorrow came to him in the loss of the old, is of course to be expected. If he were a little precipitate in asking for Priscilla’s affection before Rose had been in her unnamed grave three months, something of the blame is due to the condition of the colony, which made sentimental considerations of less value than practical ones,—an evident fact, when Mr. Winslow almost immediately on the death of his wife married the mother of Peregrine White, not two months a widow, hardly more a mother.

Apparently there were not a great many young girls in the little company. The gentle Priscilla Mullins and the high-minded Mary Chilton were the most prominent ones, at any rate. One knows instinctively that it would not be Mary Chilton towards whom the soldier would be drawn,—the daring and spirited girl who must be the first to spring ashore when the boat touched land. It is true that John Alden’s descendants ungallantly declare that he was before her in that act; but no one disputes her claim to be the first woman whose foot touched shore; and that is quite enough for one who loves to think of her and of the noble and serene Ann Hutchinson as the far-away mothers of the loftiest and loveliest soul she ever knew.

One can well conjecture Mary Chilton as comforting and supporting Priscilla in the terrors of that voyage, in such storms as that where the little ship, tossed at the waves’ will, lay almost on her beam-ends, and the drowning man who had gone down fathoms deep clutched her topsail-halyards and saved himself; or in calmer moments reading the blessed promises of His word. Young girls willing to undertake that voyage, that enterprise, and whose hearts were already so turned heavenward as the act implied, must have been of a lofty type of thought and nature; they must often have walked the narrow deck, exchanging the confidences of their hopes and dreams. I see them sitting and softly singing hymns together, on the eve of that first Sunday on the new coast, sitting by that fragrant fire of the red cedar which Captain Standish brought back to the ships after the first exploration of the forest. Priscilla might have sung, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and the voice of Rose may have added a note of sweetness to the strain. But that gentle measure would never have expressed the feelings of the Captain, whose God was “a man of war.” If, out of the tunes allowed, there were one that fitted the wild burden,—and unless their annexation to the book of Common Prayer caused the disapproval of “All such Psalms of David as Thomas Sternholde, late Grome of the Kinges Majestyes Robes, did in his lyfe-tyme drawe into Englyshe Metre,”—I can feel the zest with which the Captain may have roared out,—

One might suppose that Priscilla, gentle as tradition represents her, would have been attracted by the fire and spirit of the brave Captain. But perhaps she was not so very[29]
[30]
[31] gentle. Was there a spice of feminine coquetry in her famous speech to John Alden, for all her sweet Puritanism? Or was it that she understood the dignity and worth of womanhood, and was the first in this new land to take her stand upon it?

The whole story of the courtship which her two lovers paid to her is a bit of human nature suddenly revealing itself in the flame of a great passion,—a mighty drama moving before us, and a chance light thrown upon the stage giving the life and motion of a scene within a scene. There is a touching quality in the modest feeling of the soldier; he is still a young man, not at all grizzled, or old, or gray, as the poet paints him,—perhaps thirty-five or thirty-six years old. Daring death at every daily exposure of the colony to dangers from disease, from the tomahawk, from the sea, from the forest, always the one to go foremost and receive the brunt, to put his own life and safety a barrier against the common enemy,—yet he shrank from telling a girl that she had fired his inflammable heart, and would fain let her know the fact by the one who, if he has left no record of polished tongue or ready phrase, was the one he loved as the hero loves the man of peace, the one who loved him equally,—the youth of twenty-three whose “countenance of gospel looks” could hardly at that time have carried in its delicate lineaments much of the greatness of nature that may have belonged to the ancestor of two of our Presidents.

For the purposes of romance, fathers and mothers are often much in the way; and the poet and the romancer, with a reckless disregard of the life and safety of Mr. William Mullins, her respected parent, represent Priscilla as orphaned while her father was yet alive. It was to Mr. Mullins that John Alden, torn between duty and passion, and doubtless pale with suffering, presented the Captain’s claims. If the matter was urged rather perfunctorily, Mr. Mullins seems not to have noticed it, as he gave his ready consent. But we may be confident that Priscilla did;[33]
[34]
[35] and that, after all, maidenly delicacy would never have suffered her to utter her historic words, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” if the deadly sinking of his heart had not been evident in his downcast face. Does it need any chronicle to tell us what a flame of joy shot through John Alden’s heart at the instant of those words,—what an icy wave of despair quenched it,—what a horror of shame overcame Priscilla till her blushes became a pain? For when she had dared so much, and dared in vain, what else but shame could be her portion?

They must have been dark days that followed for the two young lovers. Can you not see John Alden trying to walk away his trouble on the stretch of the long beach, to escape his sense of treachery, his sorrow in his friend’s displeasure, his joy and his shame together?

There, too, came Priscilla, without much doubt, when the closeness of the little cluster of log huts, within a few feet of one another, grew too oppressive, or the notion that others looked askance at her, lest in any recklessness of desperation the Captain, the mainstay of the colony, threw his life away[37]
[38]
[39] in the daily expeditions he undertook,—came not as girls stroll along the shore to gather shells, to write their names on the sand, to pick up the seaweed with hues like those

as very likely she had done ere this, but to forget her trouble, to diffuse and lose it. For here, added to homesickness and horror and impending famine, was a new trouble, worse perhaps than all the rest. If her lover had been lost at sea, she might have watched for his sail,

But this was more unbearable than loss: she had dishonored herself in his eyes; she had betrayed herself, and he had scorned her; and she came to the sea for the comfort which nearness to the vast and the infinite always gives. Even that was not solitude; for there, a mile away, lay the “Mayflower,” still at anchor, where the spy-glass made her prisoner, while it was not safe for a lonely girl to tread the shore at night, watching the glow of the evening star or the moonswale on the sea. Perhaps, with Mary Chilton by her side, or with some of the smaller children of the colony, she climbed a hill, protected by the minion and the other piece of ordnance, which were afterwards mounted on the roof of the rude church, and looked down over the cluster of cabins where now the fair town lies, and thought life hard and sorry, and longed, as John Alden himself did, for the shelter of Old England. Perhaps she had no time for lovesick fancies, anyway, in the growing sickness among the people, which tasked the strength and love of all; and when, watching with the sick at night, she thrust aside a casement latticed with oiled paper, or chanced to go outside the door for fresh water to cool a fevered lip, she saw a planet rising out of the sea, or the immeasurable universe of stars wheeling overhead, over desolate shore, and water, and wilderness,[41]
[42]
[43] she felt her own woe too trivial to be dwelt upon; and when on the third of March her father died and was laid in the field where the wheat was planted over the level graves for fear of the Indians, we may be sure that she saw her trouble as part of the cross she was to bear, and waited in patience and meekness either till the rumor came of the death of Miles Standish in the Indian skirmish,—of which we know nothing,—or till John Alden had made it up with his conscience and found his chance, not in the crowded little log huts, not on the open shore, but within the leafy covert of the freshly springing woodside, with none but the fallow deer to see them, to put an end to her unrest.

Probably that period of bliss now dawned which makes most lovers feel themselves lifted into a region just above the earth and when they tread on air. It was in the hallowed time of this courtship, on the skirts of the deep pine forests, that they first happened on the mayflower, the epigea, full of the sweetest essence of the earth which lends it her name, and felt as if love and youth and joy and innocence had invented a flower for them alone,—the deeply rosy and ineffably fragrant mayflower that blooms only in the[45]
[46]
[47] Plymouth woods in its pink perfection, and whose breath must have seemed like a breath blown out of the open doors of the new life awaiting them together. If they had ventured as far as any of the numberless ponds, set like jewels in the ring of the green woods about them, something later in their new year, they would have found the blushing sabbatia in all its pristine loveliness,—the flower most typical of Priscilla herself; the flower to which some fortunate fate, in view of the sabbatical character of the region, gave the name of an old Italian botanist, as if it were its own from the beginning; a flower which is to-day less rare around Plymouth than elsewhere. Now, in the soft spring evenings, too, it may be that they strolled along the beach, and watched the phosphorescence of the waters playing about the sacred rock with which the continent had gone out first to meet them, all unweeting that it was the “corner-stone of a nation.” Now,—for lovers will be lovers still, although the whole body of Calvinism be behind them, and the lurking foe of the forest before,—they sat on the Burial Hill by night, and watched such a scene as William Allingham has pictured,—

only, instead of the three sand-side houses it was “the Seven Houses of Plymouth,” and all the beacon was the light in the “Mayflower’s” or the “Fortune’s” shrouds.

That the betrothal did not impair the friendship of the lovers with the impetuous Captain Standish, we can understand from the fact that when, subsequently, the Captain built his house over on Duxbury Hill, John Alden’s house stood near it; and that later,—and unhindered, for aught we know,—John Alden’s daughter married the Captain’s son. It pleases me to think that the dear daughter-in-law, by whom, in his last will and testament, the old Captain desired to be buried, was the daughter of Priscilla Mullins.

Priscilla and John must have had time enough for this sweet acceptance of life and nature together, for although in other instances courtship was brief, yet we know that their wedding certainly did not take place till May, as Governor Winslow then married Mrs. White, and that marriage was recorded as the first in the colony. There is indeed some probability that the engagement of the young[53]
[54]
[55] people was of quite another character from the incomprehensibly brief one just mentioned. Perhaps John Alden was building his house, and it may be that it had to be more or less commodious, since he probably became the protector of the family which Mr. Mullins left, and which is registered as numbering five persons upon landing. But if we accept the legend regarding the wedding journey, we might have to postpone the bridal for some seasons, as it was not until three years after their arrival that Edward Winslow, having gone to England and returned with cattle, made such a thing possible as that traditional ride on the back of the gentle white bull with its crimson cloth and cushion.

In fact, the incidents of real occurrence and the traditions of real descent, concerning the courtship of Priscilla, are very few. We know that Rose Standish died; that the Captain sent John Alden to urge his suit before Mr. Mullins, who replied favorably; that Priscilla asked him why he did not speak for himself; that Mr. Mullins presently died; that Captain Standish presently married elsewhere; and that John eventually married Priscilla, lived in the neighborhood of the Captain, married his daughter to the Captain’s son, and died in his old age, being known to the end as a severe and righteous and reverend man. These are the bare facts; all the rest is coloring and conjecture. Yet one has the right to surround these facts with all the possibilities of human emotion, alike in any age and with any people, which go to the making of romance and poetry, and which will do so as long as hearts beat, lips tremble, and souls desire companionship.

It is because we like to make these people, looming large through the mists of time, and on the stage of their mighty drama, real enough for our sympathies, that we love Mr. Longfellow’s version of their story. Nothing more skilful, gentle, and beautiful has ever been written concerning the Pilgrims than the beloved poet’s verses. Every incident in their pages is absolutely true to the life of the period, and although the anachronisms are many, yet they do not exceed the province of poetic license,—they are perhaps necessary to it; and many of the events are those which actually took place, if not at the stated time. Thus, for instance, it was at a later season than the poem intimates that the gory head of the savage was brought home; yet it was brought home. It was at another date that the rattlesnake skin filled with arrows was sent; yet it was sent. It was Governor Bradford and not Captain Standish who returned it stuffed with powder and shot; yet it was returned. It was much later than represented that property was held in severalty, and individuals owned their dwellings; yet they did do so in time. It was much later than the first autumn that the ships of the merchants brought cattle; yet they did bring cattle. But whether the cattle came early or late, that snow-white bull with his crimson saddle-cloth gives occasion for one of the most beautiful pictures in literature. Europa herself, fleeing over the meadow on her white bull, flecked with warm sunshine, with shadows of leaves and flowers, all white and rosy loveliness as she fled, is not a fairer picture to the mind than this exquisite one of the bridal procession, where