Old this New World is,--geologically more ancient, perhaps, than that hemisphere from whose western edge Columbus set sail, four centuries ago, and found our continent lying across his way, as he plodded to Cathay. Yet, uncounted as our barbarous centuries and antediluvian æons are, real history begins only with the opening of the seventeenth century, when the English Puritan and the French Jesuit transferred to these shores the unfolding civilization and the rival religions of Western Europe. When we see at Plymouth the wooded glacial hillsides, under which the Pilgrims landed and established democracy in their wilderness, we may remember that their venture, though bolder, because earlier, than that of Bulkeley and Willard, who planted the Concord colony, was yet but fifteen years in advance, and was made beside a friendly ocean, bearing succor and trade, and feeding them from its abundance. But the Concord colonists sat down in the gloomy shadow of the forest, amid trails of the savage and the wolf. Still more heroic was the crusade of the Jesuit in New France; but while romance and martyrdom were his lot, our Puritans planted here the germs of a grand republic. “God said, ‘I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor. I will divide my goods, Call in the wretch and slave; None shall rule but the humble, And none but Toil shall have.’” The first event in the history of Massachusetts was this planting of a territorial democracy. The colony of Concord was granted by Winthrop and his legislature in September, 1635, to Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan minister, from the little parish of Odell or Woodhill (colloquially called “Wuddle”) in English Bedfordshire, and to Simon Willard, a merchant, from Hawkshurst in Kent. Twelve other [Illustration: CONCORD RIVER, BY THOREAU’S LANDING.] families were joined with them in the grant, and another minister, Rev. John Jones, brought other families from England, aiming towards Concord, in October, 1635. The situation was doubtless chosen by Major Willard, an Indian trader and in after years a fighter of the Indians; who also selected and partly colonized two other towns, farther in the wilderness,--Groton and Lancaster. But the true father of this Concord, and probably the giver of its name (altering it from the Indian Musketaquit), was Rev. Peter Bulkeley, ancestor of its most celebrated citizen, Waldo Emerson. Of this worthy, whose grave, like that of Moses, is unknown to this day, something should be said, before we come to later heroes. Peter Bulkeley was the son of Rev. Edward Bulkeley, a doctor of divinity in English Cambridge,--a scholar and man of wealth, who was rector of the Bedfordshire parish just named, where his son was born in 1583. He succeeded his father there in 1620.