But this emigration was merely preliminary; it was the first patter of the coming shower; it was the scouts of the Pilgrims, making an initial survey of the new Hesperia of Puritanism. In June, 1636, the principal caravan, led by Thomas Hooker and John Haynes, began its march. “There were of the company about one hundred souls, many of them persons accustomed to the affluence and ease of European life. They drove before them numerous herds of cattle; and thus they traversed the pathless forests of Massachusetts, advancing hardly ten miles a day through the tangled woods, across the swamps and numerous streams, and over the highlands that separated the intervening valleys; subsisting, as they slowly wandered along, on the milk of the kine, who browsed on the fresh leaves and early shoots; having no guide through the nearly untrodden wilderness but the compass, and no pillow for their nightly rest but heaps of stones. How did the hills echo with the unwonted lowing of the herds! How were the forests enlivened by the fervent piety of Hooker! Never again was there such a pilgrimage from the seaside ‘to the delightful banks’ of the Connecticut.”[914] The Pilgrims paused at Hartford, which the presence of Hooker and Haynes soon lifted into the foremost importance, and it became the Jerusalem of the west. The government was similar to that which Winthrop, and Endicott, and Cotton had shaped at Boston, except that now the church-membership test was omitted, church and state were half-divorced, and all freemen were citizens[915]—liberality which placed the new-born state close beside the Providence plantations in magnanimous catholicity. Indeed, Haynes, whose plastic hand moulded the primitive constitution of Connecticut, had gone through a bitter experience in the trial and banishment of Roger Williams; and his wiser statesmanship bade him beware lest, in steering clear of the Scylla of anarchy, he should ground his politics on the Charybdis of bigotry. His wise tact saved him from both perils, and enabled him, while never interrupting the _entente cordiale_ with Massachusetts, to open a friendly intercourse with the Rhode Island “heretics.”[916] A twelvemonth after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Hartford, the pioneers were flanked by an invasion of brother Puritans fresh from England. New Haven was planted; and in 1637, Guilford was colonized, and then Milford was settled.[917] These were independent of Connecticut, and for upwards of forty years formed a separate colony, called New Haven.[918] “The settlers,” says Cotton Mather, “were under the conduct of as holy, and as prudent, and as genteel persons, as ever visited these nooks of New England; and though they, in a manner, stole out of Britain, being forbidden to sail, yet they dropped here a plantation constellated with many stars of the first magnitude; for if Theophilus Eaton and John Davenport were not blazing lights, where shall we hunt for meteors?”[919]