My lord proposed to erect a miniature Babylon amid similar pleasant surroundings, a little dream-city by the sea, a home for the innocent pleasure-seeker stifled by the
puritanism of the great towns, refugium peccatorum in this island of the saints.
Then would have arisen, like the shade of departed
Puritanism, the venerable dignity of the white-bearded Governor Bradstreet.
Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of
Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up.
A loyal vagabond; if only his
puritanism doesn't shy at a likeness .
It betokened the cheeriness of an active temperament, finding joy in its activity, and, therefore, rendering it beautiful; it was a New England trait,--the stern old stuff of
Puritanism with a gold thread in the web.
In their train were minstrels, not unknown in London streets; wandering players, whose theatres had been the halls of noblemen; mummers, rope-dancers, and mountebanks, who would long be missed at wakes, church ales, and fairs; in a word, mirth makers of every sort, such as abounded in that age, but now began to be discountenanced by the rapid growth of
Puritanism. Light had their footsteps been on land, and as lightly they came across the sea.
But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss
Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.
During the reign of
Puritanism in England the people had been forbidden even innocent pleasures.
At Cambridge he assimilated two of the controlling forces of his life, the moderate
Puritanism of his college and Platonic idealism.
Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely
puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.
"I lurve England," he used to say--"lurve England, but
Puritanism, sorr, I abhor.
The only other things are a few old missals and little Catholic pictures, which the Ogilvies kept, I suppose, from the Middle Ages--their family pride being stronger than their
Puritanism. We only put them in the museum because they seem curiously cut about and defaced."