Miles Standish

The "Courtship of Miles Standish" is a beautiful tribute from our poet Longfellow to the memory of his mother's ancestry, she being a lineal descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. The story relates the trials and sufferings of the Pilgrim Fathers. The "Pilgrims," one hundred and two in number, set sail from Plymouth in the Mayflower, and arrived off the coast of North America (now Massachusetts) in the winter of 1620, calling their settlement New Plymouth. The accounts of the trials and sufferings of these early settlers are among our most precious memorials, and descent from the first passengers of the Mayflower counts almost as much in this country as the Norman pedigree in England. Longfellow has grouped in his story nearly all the traditions that have come down to us, and has included some of the memorable sayings of John Eliot, the missionary to the Indians. The incidents of the return of the Mayflower, and the plots of the savages to exterminate the colony, are matters of history; so, too, the sending by Miles Standish of John Alden to court the beautiful Priscilla by proxy; while the arch reply of the maiden, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" is heard in every household. A monument to the "Puritan Hero," Miles Standish, is in course of erection at South Duxbury, Mass. It is a statue of the brave pilgrim soldier, cut from Cape Ann granite. The character of Priscilla is one that charms us as we follow the story of her noble and womanly love, and when we remember that Longfellow was her lineal descendant, we feel an increased interest in the noble woman who dared to let her heart speak for itself. The poet has gone back more than two hundred years to lay this beautiful tribute on the grave of the mother of his race. The wedding procession, where Priscilla, like the classic Europa, is riding on a garlanded bull, (since no horses had been yet imported,) with her accepted and her rejected lover supporting her on the right and left, and the missionary Eliot just behind, is the subject of a painting by J. W. Ehninger of the National Academy. If Standish was so magnanimous as thus to assist in bringing home the bride, his rule over his own spirit proved him worthy of a yet more peerless queen of hearts.

B. J. Lossing, author of the "Field Book of the Revolution," owns a volume inscribed "Myles Standish, 1643." The signature is as bold as John Hancock's. The book is a translation of Ovid, by George Sandys in Virginia, the first book ever made in the United States. It was published at London in 1626, is finely illustrated, and is a most interesting memorial of the most belligerent of the Plymouth worthies.