He died in his fifty-first year, “even as fruit falleth before it is ripe, when neither length of days nor infirmity of body did seem to call for his end.”[532] The discarded flesh-tabernacle was laid to rest in the chancel of one of the churches at Leyden,[533] allotted by the Dutch for the use of the English exiles; and the magistrates, ministers, professors, and students, followed him to the grave.[534] Robinson was the Moses of the Pilgrims, and like his prototype, he looked into the promised land from the top of Pisgah, but he did not enter it. Intrigue balked him of that felicity, and “hope deferred made his heart sick.” But ideas cannot be barred out. His entered the wilderness, and germinated democracy and the representative system. “His truth, planted at Plymouth, has blossomed on the rocky shores, in the sheltered valleys, and on the breezy hills of New England, and borne a grand harvest.” CHAPTER XIX. PROGRESS. “And when our children turn the page To ask what triumphs marked our age— What we achieved to challenge praise, Through the long line of future days— This let them read, and hence instruction draw: ‘Here were the many blest, Here found the virtues rest, Faith linked with Love, and Liberty with Law.’” SPRAGUE’S _Centennial Ode_. The progress of population at Plymouth was slow for a decade. The lands in the vicinity were not fertile. Still the plantation had struck deep root and was bound to spring up and bear a hundred fold.[535] If the colonial prosperity was not imposing, it was thriving. A little earlier than this Smith learned in Virginia that there were on this New England slope “about a hundred and eighty persons; some cattle and goats; many swine and a good store of poultry; and thirty-two dwelling-houses; forming a town which was impaled about half a mile’s compass, with a fort built of wood, loam, and stone; also a fair watch-tower; and able to freight a ship of a hundred and eighty tons burden.”[536] Fifty ships were on the coast engaged in fishing, every one of which was an enlargement of their market for the sale and purchase of essential commodities.[537] “It pleased the Lord,” says Bradford, “to give the plantation peace, and health, and contented minds, and so bless the labors of the colonists that they had provisions in plenty, and to spare; and this without receiving any food from home at any time, except what they brought out in the Mayflower.”[538]