“In each of these early instances there was an element of romance, of strong conviction of duty, mingled with an appreciation alike of the beautiful and the practical, that combination which, as Horace told us long ago, ‘carries every vote.’ To some extent this had passed away two hundred years ago, when possession was taken of the farming lands, and the fair, though rugged, hillsides enclosing the river valley in which we now stand. The settlers, who came up into the high grounds from the shores of the Sound, did not leave, for the most part, on account of disagreement with their neighbors in matters civil or ecclesiastical, nor with a special sense of divine calling or mission. They were rather led by the Anglo-Saxon spirit of colonization to settle on new soil, to extend former industries or to undertake new ones, and to organize new units of life in the body politic. Still, we cannot doubt that when they, too, looked over the fields they saw more than the possibility of gathering harvests and crops from them, and that when they followed the water-courses they did more than estimate the use which they might make of the force of the falling stream. They had something of the enthusiasm of discovery, and something of the joy of those who first turn nature’s forces to man’s account. It is worth our while, as we go back in mind to these beginnings, to try to think as they thought, who first looked upon the natural features of the landscape, which it takes much more than two centuries materially to change, and to see why they chose as they did, who fixed on this spot as their home.