With this twofold object, a public school was called into life at Cambridge in 1636; and in that same year the General Court made a grant of four hundred pounds, which formed the legs on which the infant university first toddled.[901] Later, John Harvard bequeathed eight hundred pounds and his library to help forward the scholastic venture; whereupon the grateful authorities eternized the donor’s name by calling the school HARVARD COLLEGE.[902] Henceforth New England had a “city of books.” Harvard college speedily became a nursery of piety, and was to America, as Livy said of Greece, _sal gentium_.[903] In narrating this achievement, the quaint divine who heaped together the mingled wheat and chaff of the _Magnalia_, cites triumphantly the language of the orator who chanted pæans to the English Cambridge: “We have now provided—and let envy be as far removed from this declaration as is falsehood—that in popular assemblies stone shall not talk to stone; that the church shall not lack priests, or the bar jurists, or the community physicians; for we have supplied the church, the government, the senate, and the army, with accomplished men.”[904] Thus the new university was rightly esteemed an ornament and a civilizer; for learning, as the poet has hymned it, “Chastens the manners, and the soul refines.”[905] The school is at once preserver and benefactor; it is _urbis medicus_, the physician of the state. And now the settlements along the coast-line of Massachusetts were become “like hives overstocked with bees; and many of the new inhabitants began to entertain the thought of swarming into plantations farther in the interior.” The fifteen thousand settlers in Massachusetts felt crowded. They longed to imitate the Plymouth Pilgrims, who had sent out a forlorn hope to colonize Windsor, and the venture of the younger Winthrop at Saybrook. They too, longed “To descry new lands, Rivers and mountains, in this spotty globe.” As early as 1634, Hooker’s parishioners, at Cambridge, had petitioned the General Court to permit them “to look out either for enlargement or removal.”[906] The authorities withheld their assent at the outset; but when, in 1636, the motion was renewed, they said Yes.[907] Hooker—whom Morton calls “a son of thunder”[908]—and Haynes were the chief promoters of this project to remove.[909] The winter of 1635-6 was spent in active preparation. Scouting parties were thrown forward. In the opening of the year, Hartford was settled, government was organized, civil order was established.[910] At the same time pioneers went out from Dorchester, and pushing the earlier Plymouth settlers from the ground, usurped Windsor in the name of Massachusetts Bay.[911] Others quitted Watertown, and sat down at Wethersfield;[912] while some left Roxbury, and were enchurched at Springfield, which was afterwards found to lie within the boundary of the old Bay State.[913]