Naturally they failed to agree. The unfortunate writer, having scruples which prevented his accepting an offer of fifty pounds for the manuscript, made probably by some Hutchinsonian, waited the pleasure of the brethren, reminding them at intervals of his claim, but so far as can be discovered, failing always to make it good, and the manuscript itself disappeared, carrying with it the only tangible testimony to the bitterness and intolerance of which even the owners were in after years ashamed.

In the meantime, Harry Vane, despairing of peaceful life among his enemies, had sailed for England early in August, to pass through every phase of political and spiritual experience, and to give up his life at last on the scaffold to which the treachery of the second Charles condemned him. With his departure, no powerful friend remained to Anne Hutchinson, whose ruin had been determined upon and whose family were seeking a new and safer home. Common prudence should have made her give up her public meetings and show some deference to the powers she had always defied. Even this, however, could not have saved her, and in November, 1637, the trial began which even to-day no New Englander can recall without shame; a trial in which civil, judicial, and ecclesiastical forces all united to crush a woman, whose deepest fault was a too enthusiastic belief in her own inspiration.

Winthrop conducted the prosecution, mild and calm in manner, but resolutely bent upon punishment, and by him sat Dudley, Endicott, Bradstreet, Nowell and Stoughton; Bradstreet and Winthrop being the only ones who treated her with the faintest semblance of courtesy. Welde and Symmes, Wilson and Hugh Peters, faced her with a curious vindictiveness, and in the throng of excited listenders, hardly a friendly face met her eyes, even her old friend, John Cotton, having become simply a timid instrument of her persecutors.

The building in which the trial took place was thronged. Hundreds who had been attracted by her power, looked on: magistrates and ministers, yeoman and military, the sad colored garments of the gentry in their broad ruffs and high crowned hats, bringing out the buff coats of the soldiers, and the bright bodices of the women, who clung to the vanities of color, and defied the tacit law that limited them to browns and drabs. Over all hung the gray November sky, and the chill of the dolorous month was in the air, and did its work toward intensifying the bitterness which ruled them all.

It is doubtful if Anne Bradstreet made one of the spectators. Her instinct would have been to remain away, for the sympathy she could not help but feel, could not betray itself, without at once ranking her in opposition to the judgment of both husband and father. Anne Hutchinson's condition was one to excite the compassion and interest of every woman, but it had no such effect on her judges, who forced her to stand till she nearly fell from exhaustion. Food was denied her; no counsel was allowed, or the presence of any friend who could have helped by presence, if in no other way.

Feeble in body, depressed and anxious in mind, one reacted on another, and the marvel is not that she here and there contradicted herself, or lost patience, but that any coherence or power of argument remained.

The records of the trial show both. Winthrop opened it by making a general charge of heresy, and Anne demanded a specific one, and when the charge of holding unlawful meetings was brought, denied it so energetically and effectually, that Winthrop had no more words and turned the case over to the less considerate Dudley, whose wrath at her presumption knew no bounds. Both he and the ministers who swore against her, used against her statements which she had made in private interviews with them, which she had supposed to be confidential, but which were now reported in detail. Naturally she reproached the witnesses with being informers, and they justified their course hotly. Mr. Cotton's testimony, given most reluctantly, confirmed their statements. The chief grievance was not her meetings, so much as the fact that she had publicly criticized the teaching and religious character of the ministers, insisting that Mr. Cotton alone had the full "thorough-furnishing" for such work. Deep but smothered feeling was apparent in every word the initiated witnesses spoke, and the magistrate, Mr. Coddington, in vain assured them, that even if she had said all this and more, no real harm had been done. Cotton sided with him, and spoke so powerfully that there was a slight diversion in her favor, rendered quite null by her claim of immediate inspiration in what she had done.

The records at this point, show none of the excitement, the hysterical ecstasy which marked the same declaration in the case of some among the Quakers who were afterward tried. Her calmness increased instead of lessening. On the score of contempt of the ministers it had become evident that she could not be convicted, but this claim to direct revelation, was an even more serious matter. Scripture might be twisted to the point of dismemberment, so long as one kept to the text, and made no pretence of knowledge beyond it; contention within these bounds was lawful and honorable, and the daily food of these argumentative Christians who gave themselves to the work of combining intellectual freedom and spiritual slavery, with perpetual surprise at any indication that the two were incompatible.

The belief in personal revelation, actually no more than a deep impression produced by long pondering over some passage, was really part of the Puritan faith, but the united company had no thought of discovering points of harmony, or brushing aside mere phrases which simply concealed the essential truth held by both. Such belief could come only from the direct prompting of Satan, and when she firmly and solemnly declared that whatever way their judgment went, she should be saved from calamity, that she was and should remain, in direct communion with God, and that they were simply pitiless persecutors of the elect, the wrath was instant and boundless. A unanimous vote condemned her at once, and stands in the records of Massachusetts as follows:

"Mrs. Hutchinson, the wife of Mr. William Hutchinson, being convicted for traducing the ministers and their ministry in the country, she declared voluntarily her revelations, and that she should be delivered, and the Court ruined with their posterity, and thereupon was banished, and in the meanwhile was committed to Mr. Joseph Welde (of Roxbury) until the Court shall dispose of her."

Her keeper for the winter was the brother of her worst enemy. She was to be kept there at the expense of her husband, but forbidden to pursue any of her usual occupations. Naturally she sunk into a deep melancholy, in no wise lessened by constant visits from the ministers, who insisted upon discussing her opinions, and who wrought upon her till she was half distracted. They accused her of falsehoods, declaring that she held "gross errors, to the number of thirty or thereabouts," and badgering the unhappy creature till it is miraculous that any spirit remained. Then came the church trial, more legitimate, but conducted with fully as much virulence as the secular one, the day of the weekly lecture, Thursday, being chosen, as that which brought together the greatest number of people.

The elders accused her of deliberate lying, and point by point, brought up the thirty errors. Of some she admitted her possible mistake; others she held to strenuously, but all were simply speculation, not one having any vital bearing on faith or life. Public admonition was ordered, but before this her two sons had been publicly censured for refusing to join in signing the paper which excommunicated her, Mr. Cotton addressing them "most pitifully and pathetically," as "giving way to natural affection and as tearing the very bowels of their souls by hardening their mother in sin." Until eight in the evening, an hour equivalent to eleven o'clock with our present habits, the congregation listened to question and answer and admonition, in which last, Mr. Cotton "spake to the sisters of the church, and advised them to take heed of her opinions, and to withhold all countenance and respect from her, lest they should harden her in her sin."

Anne Bradstreet must have listened with a curious mixture of feelings, though any evidence of them would naturally be repressed. Once more all came together, and once more, Anne Hutchinson, who faced them in this last encounter with a quiet dignity, that moved the more sympathetic to pity, denied the charges they brought, and the three years controversy which, as Ellis writes, "had drawn nearly the whole of the believers in Boston—-magistrates, ministers, women, soldiers, and the common multitude under the banners of a female leader, had changed the government of the Colony, and spread its strange reports over Protestant Europe, was thus brought to an issue, by imputing deception about one of the most unintelligible tenets of faith to her, who could not be circumvented in any other way."

The closest examination of her statements shows no ground for this judgment. It was the inferences of her opponents, and no fact of her real belief that made against her, but inference, then as now, made the chief ground for her enemies. Excommunication followed at once, and now, the worst having come, her spirits rose, and she faced them with quiet dignity, but with all her old assurance, glorying in the whole experience so that one of the indignant ministers described her manner with deep disgust, and added: "God giving her up, since the sentence of excommunication, to that hardness of heart, as she is not affected with any remorse, but glories in it, and fears not the vengeance of God which she lies under, as if God did work contrary to his own word, and loosed from heaven, while his church had bound upon earth."

Other ministers were as eager in denunciation, preaching against her as "the American Jezebel," and even the saintly Hooker wrote: "The expression of providence against this wretched woman hath proceeded from the Lord's miraculous mercy, and his bare arm hath been discovered therein from first to last, that all the churches may hear and fear. I do believe such a heap of hideous errors at once to be vented by such a self-deluding and deluded creature, no history can record; and yet, after recantation of all, to be cast out as unsavory salt, that she may not continue a pest to the place, that will be forever marvellous in the eyes of all the saints."

Even the lapse of several generations left the animus unchanged, and Graham, usually so dispassionate and just in statement, wrote of her almost vindictively:

"In the assemblies which were held by the followers of Mrs. Hutchinson, there was nourished and trained a keen, contentious spirit, and an unbridled license of tongue, of which the influence was speedily felt in the serious disturbance, first of domestic happiness, and then of the public peace. The matrons of Boston were transformed into a synod of slanderous praters, whose inquisitional deliberations and audacious decrees, instilled their venom into the innermost recesses of society; and the spirits of a great majority of the citizen being in that combustible state in which a feeble spark will suffice to kindle a formidable conflagration, the whole Colony was inflamed and distracted by the incontinence of female spleen and presumption."

Amidst this rattle of theological guns there was danger that others might be heard. To subdue Boston was the first necessity, and an order for disarming the disaffected was issued. The most eminent citizens, if suspected of favoring her, had their firearms taken from them, and even Capt. John Underhill was forced to give up his sword. An account of the whole controversy was written by Mr. Welde and sent over to England for publication in order that the Colony might not suffer from slanderous reports, and that no "godly friends" might be prevented from coming over. For the winter of 1637, Boston was quiet, but it was an ominous quiet, in which destructive forces gathered, and though never visible on the surface, worked in evil ways for more than one of the generations that followed. Freedom had ended for any who differed from the faith as laid down by the Cambridge Synod, and but one result could follow. All the more liberal spirits saw that Massachusetts could henceforth be no home for them, and made haste to other points. Coddington led a colony to Rhode Island, made up chiefly of the fifty-eight who had been disarmed, and in process of time became a Quaker. This was the natural ending for many, the heart of Anne Hutchinson's doctrine being really a belief in the "Inward Light," a doctrine which seems to have outraged every Puritan susceptibility for fully a hundred years, and until the reaction began, which has made individual judgment the only creed common to the people of New England. It was reasonable enough, however, that Massachusetts should dread a colony of such uneasy spirits, planted at her very doors, enfranchised and heretical to an appalling degree and considered quite as dangerous as so many malefactors, and an uneasy and constant watch was kept.

The Hutchinsons had sold their property in Boston and joined Coddington at Pocasset, of which Mr. Hutchinson soon became the chief magistrate. His wife, as before, was the master spirit. She even addressed an admonition to the church in Boston, turning the tables temporarily upon her enemies, though the end of her power was at hand. In 1642, her husband died, and various circumstances had before this made her influence feared and disliked. Freedom in any English settlement had ceased to be possible, and as Massachusetts grew more powerful, she resigned any hope of holding the place won by so many sacrifices and emigrated to the Dutch settlement, forming a small colony of sixteen persons at Pelham in Westchester County, New York, where a little river still bears her name.

One son had remained in Boston, and was the ancestor of the Tory Governor of Massachusetts during the Revolution, and a daughter also married and settled there, so that her blood is still found in the veins of more than one New England family, some of whose ancestors were most directly concerned in casting her out. But her younger children and a son-in-law were still with her, with a few of her most devoted followers, and she still anticipated peace and a quiet future. Both came at last, but not in the looked-for guise. No date remains of the fate of the little colony and only the Indian custom of preserving the names of those they killed, has made us know that Wampago himself, the owner of the land about Pelham, was the murderer of the woman, whose troubled but not unhappy life went out in the fire and blood of an Indian massacre.

To the Puritans in Boston, such fate seemed justice, and they rejoiced with a grim exultation. "The Lord," said Welde, "heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from our great and sore affliction." No tale was too gross and shameless to find acceptance, and popular feeling against her settled into such fixed enmity that even her descendant, the historian Hutchinson, dared not write anything that would seem to favor her cause. Yet, necessary as her persecution and banishment may have been to the safety of the Colony, the faith for which she gave her life has been stronger than her enemies. Mistaken as she often was, a truer Christianity dwelt with her than with them, and the toleration denied her has shown itself as the heart of all present life or future progress.



CHAPTER VII.

COLONIAL LITERARY DEVELOPMENT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

It was before the final charge from Ipswich to Andover, that the chief part of Anne Bradstreet's literary work was done, the ten years after her arrival in New England being the only fruitful ones. As daughter and wife of two of the chief magistrates, she heard the constant discussion of questions of policy as well as questions of faith, both strongly agitated by the stormy years of Anne Hutchinson's stay in Boston, and it is very probable that she sought refuge from the anxiety of the troubled days, in poetical composition, and in poring over Ancient History found consolation in the fact that old times were by no means better than the new. The literary life of New England had already begun, and it is worth while to follow the lines of its growth and development, through the colonial days, if only to understand better the curious limitations for any one who sought to give tangible form to thought, whether in prose or poetry. For North and South, the story was the same.

The points of divergence in the northern and southern colonies have been so emphasized, and the impression has become so fixed, that the divisions of country had as little in common as came later to be the fact, that any statement as to their essential agreement, is distrusted or denied. Yet even to-day, in a region where many causes have made against purity of blood, the traveller in the South is often startled, in some remote town of the Carolinas or of Virginia, at the sight of what can only be characterized as a Southern Yankee. At one's very side in the little church may sit a man who, if met in Boston, would be taken for a Brahmin of the Brahmins. His face is as distinctively a New England one as was Emerson's. High but narrow forehead, prominent nose, thin lips, and cheek bones a trifle high; clear, cold blue eyes and a slender upright figure Every line shows repressed force, the possibility of passionate energy, of fierce enmity and ruthless judgment on anything outside of personal experience. Culture is equally evident, but culture refusing to believe in anything modern, and resting its claims on little beyond the time of Queen Anne. It is the Puritan alive again, and why not? Descended directly from some stray member of the Cromwellian party who fled at the Restoration, he chose Virginia rather than New England, allured by the milder climate. But he is of the same class, the same prejudices and limitations as the New England Puritan, the sole difference being that he has stood still while the other passed on unrestingly. But in 1635, it was merely a difference of location, never of mental habit, that divided them. For both alike, the description given by one of our most brilliant writers, applied the English people of the seventeenth century being summed up in words quite as applicable to-day as then: "At that time, though they were apparently divided into many classes, they were really divided into only two—-first, the disciples of things as they are; second, the disciples of things as they ought to be."

It was chiefly "the disciples of things as they ought to be" that passed over from Old England to the New, and as such faith means usually supreme discomfort for its holder, and quite as much for the opposer, there was a constant and lively ebullition of forces on either side. Every Puritan who came over waged a triple war— first, with himself as a creature of malignant and desperate tendencies, likely at any moment to commit some act born of hell; second, with the devil, at times regarded as practically synonymous with one's own nature, at others as a tangible and audacious adversary; and last and always, with all who differed from his own standard of right and wrong—-chiefly wrong. The motto of that time was less "Dare to do right," than "Do not dare to do wrong." All mental and spiritual furnishings were shaken out of the windows daily, by way of dislodging any chance seeds of vice sown by the great adversary. One would have thought the conflict with natural forces quite enough to absorb all superfluous energy, every fact of climate, soil and natural features being against them, but neither scanty harvests, nor Indian wars, nor devastating disease, had the power to long suppress this perpetual and unflinching self-discipline.

Unlike any other colony of the New World, the sole purpose and motive of action was an ideal one. The Dutch sought peltries and trade in general, and whereever they established themselves, at once gave tokens of material comfort and prosperity. The more Southern Colonies were this basis, adding to it the freedom of life—the large hospitality possible where miles of land formed the plantation, and service meant no direct outlay or expense. Here and there a Southern Puritan was found, as his type may be found to-day, resisting the charm of physical ease and comfort, and constituting himself a missionary to the Indians of South Carolina, or to settlements remote from all gospel privileges, but for the most part the habits of an English squire-ruled country prevailed, and were enlarged upon; each man in the centre of his great property being practically king. Dispersion of forces was the order, and thus many necessities of civilization were dispensed with. The man who had a river at his door had no occasion to worry over the making or improvement of roads, a boat carrying his supplies, and bridle-paths sufficing his horse and himself. With no need for strenuous conflict with nature or man, the power of resistance died naturally. Sharp lines softened; muscles weakened, and before many generations the type had so altered that the people who had left England as one, were two, once for all.

The law of dispersion, practical and agreeable to the Southern landholder, would have been destruction to his New England brethren. For the latter, concentration was the only safety. They massed together in close communities, and necessarily were forced to plan for the general rather than for the individual good. In such close quarters, where every angle made itself felt, and constant contact developed and implied criticism, law must work far more minutely than in less exacting communities. Every tendency to introspection and self-judging was strengthened to the utmost, and merciless condemnation for one's self came to mean a still sharper one for others. With every power of brain and soul they fought against what, to them, seemed the one evil for that or any time—toleration. Each man had his own thought, and was able to put it into strong words. No colony has ever known so large a proportion of learned men, there being more graduates of Cambridge and Oxford between the years 1630 and 1690 than it was possible to find in a population of the same size in the mother country. "In its inception, New England was not an agricultural community, nor a manufacturing community, nor a trading community; it was a thinking community—-an arena and mart for ideas—its characteristic organ being not the hand, nor the heart, nor the pocket, but the brain."

The material for learning, we have seen, was of the scantiest, not only for Winthrop's Colony but for those that preceded it.

The three little ships that, on a misty afternoon in December, 1606, dropped down the Thames with sails set for an unknown country, carried any freight but that of books. Book-makers were there in less proportion than on board the solitary vessel that, in 1620, took a more northerly course, and cast anchor at last off the bleak and sullen shore of Massachusetts; but for both alike the stress of those early years left small energy or time for any composition beyond the reports that, at stated intervals, went back to the mother country. The work of the pioneer is for muscles first, brain having small opportunity, save as director; and it required more than one generation before authorship could become the business of any, not even the clergy being excepted from the stress of hard manual labor.

Yet, for the first departure, an enthusiasm of hope and faith filled many hearts. The England of that day had not been too kindly toward her men of letters, who were then, as now, also men of dreams, looking for something better than the best she had to offer, and who, in the early years of the seventeenth century, gathered in London as the centre least touched by the bigotry and narrowness of one party, the wild laxity and folly of the other. "The very air of London must have been electric with the daily words of those immortals whose casual talk upon the pavement by the street-side was a coinage of speech richer, more virile, more expressive than has been known on this planet since the great days of Atheman poetry, eloquence and mirth." There were "wits, dramatists, scholars, orators, singers, philosophers." For every one of them was the faith of something undefined, yet infinitely precious, to be born of all the mysterious influences in that new land to which all eyes turned, and old Michael Drayton's ringing ode on their departure held also a prophecy:

"In kenning of the shore, Thanks to God first given, O you, the happiest men, Be frolic then; Let cannons roar, Frighting the wide heaven.

"And in regions far Such heroes bring ye forth As those from whom we came; And plant our name Under that star Not known unto our north.

"And as there plenty grows Of laurel everywhere— Apollo's sacred tree— You, it may see, A poet's brows to crown That may sing there."

The men who, in passing over to America could not cease to be Englishmen, were the friends and associates—the intellectual equals in many points of this extraordinary assemblage of brilliant and audacious intellects; and chief among them was the man at whose name we are all inclined to smile—Captain John Smith. So many myths have hid the real man from view—some of them, it must be admitted, of his own making—that we forget how vivid and resolute a personality he owned, and the pride we may well have in him as the writer of the first distinctively American book. His work was not only for Virginia, but for New England as well. His life was given to the interests of both. Defeated plans, baffled hopes, had no power to quench the absorbing love that filled him to the end, and, at the very last, he wrote of the American colonies: "By that acquaintance I have with them, I call them my children; for they have been my wife, my hawks, hounds, my cards, my dice, and, in total, my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my left hand to my right."

Certain qualities, most prominent then, have, after a long disappearance, become once more, in degree at least, characteristic of the time. The book man of to-day is quite as likely to be also the man of affairs, and the pale and cloistered student of the past is rather a memory than a present fact. History thus repeats itself as usual, and the story of the literary men of the nineteenth century has many points in common with that of the seventeenth.

Smith's description of New England had had active circulation in the Mother Country, and many a Puritan trusted it entirely, who would have frowned upon the writer had he appeared in person to testify of what he had seen. Certainly the Cavalier predominated in him, the type to which he belonged being of the noble one "of which the Elizabethan age produced so many examples—the man of action who was also the man of letters; the man of letters who was also a man of action; the wholesomest type of manhood anywhere to be found; body and brain both active, both cultivated; the mind not made fastidious and morbid by too much bookishness, nor coarse and dull by too little; not a doer who is dumb, not a speech-maker who cannot do; the knowledge that comes of books, widened and freshened by the knowledge that comes of experience; the literary sense fortified by common sense; the bashfulness and delicacy of the scholar hovering as a finer presence above the forceful audacity of the man of the world; at once bookman, penman, swordsman, diplomat, sailor, courtier, orator. Of this type of manhood, spacious, strong, refined and sane, were the best men of the Elizabethan time, George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, in a modified sense, Hakluyt, Bacon, Sackville, Shakespeare, Ben Johnson and nearly all the rest."

It would have been impossible to make John Smith a Puritan, but an ameliorated Puritan might easily have become a John Smith. It is worth while to recall his work and that of his fellow colonists, if only to note the wide and immediate departure of thought in the northern and southern colonies, even where the Puritan element entered in, nor can we understand Anne Bradstreet, without a thought of the forces at work in the new country, unconscious but potent causes of all phases of literary life in that early time.

The Virginia colonist had more knowledge of the world and less knowledge of himself, introspection, or any desire for it, being no part of his mental constitution or habit.

Intellectually, he demanded a spherical excellence, easier then than now, and attained by many a student of that day, and to this Captain John aspired, one at least of his contemporaries giving proof of faith that he had attained it in lines written on him and his book on the history of Virginia and New England:

"Like Caesar, now thou writ'st what them hast done. These acts, this book, will live while there's a sun."

The history is picturesque, and often amusing. As a writer he was always "racy, terse, fearless," but, save to the special student, there is little value to the present student, unless he be a searcher after the spirit that moved not only the man, but, through him, the time he moulded. For such reader will still be felt "the impression of a certain personal largeness ... magnanimity, affluence, sense and executive force. Over all his personal associates in American adventure he seems to tower, by the natural loftiness and reach of the perception with which he grasped the significance of their vast enterprise and the means to its success.... He had the faults of an impulsive, irascible, egotistic and imaginative nature; he sometimes bought human praise at too high a price, but he had great abilities in word and deed; his nature was, upon the whole, generous and noble; and during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, he did more than any other Englishman to make an American nation and an American literature possible."

Behind the stockade at Jamestown, only the most persistent bent toward letters had chance of surviving. Joyful as the landing had been, the Colony had no sturdy backbone of practical workers. Their first summer was unutterably forlorn, the beauty and fertility that had seemed to promise to the sea-sad eyes a life of instant ease, bringing with it only a "horrible trail of homesickness, discord, starvation, pestilence and Indian hostility." No common purpose united them, as in the Northern Colony. Save for the leaders, individual profit had been the only ambition or intention. Work had no place in the scheme of life, and even when ship after ship discharged its load of immigrants matters were hardly mended. Perpetual discord became the law. Smith fled from the tumults which he had no power to quiet, and a long succession of soon-discouraged officers waged a species of hand-to-hand conflict with the wild elements that made up the Colony. One poet, George Sandys, whose name and work are still of meaning and value to the student, found leisure, borrowed from the night, for a translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," commended by both Dryden and Pope, and which passed at once through eight editions, but there were no others.

Twenty years of colonial life had ended when he returned to England, and the spirit of the early founders had well nigh disappeared. Literary work had died with it. A few had small libraries, chiefly Latin classics, but a curious torpor had settled down, the reasons for which are now evident. There was no constant intercourse, as in New England. The "policy of dispersion" was the law, for every man aspired to be a large land- owner, and, in the midst of his tract of half-cleared land, had small communication with any but his inferiors. Within fifty years any intellectual standard had practically ceased to exist. The Governor, Sir William Berkeley, whose long rule meant death to progress, thundered against the printing-press, and believed absolutely in the "fine old conservative policy of keeping subjects ignorant in order to keep them submissive." For thirty- six years his energies were bent in this direction. Protest of any sort simply intensified his purpose, and when 1670 dawned he had the happiness of making to the English Commissioners a reply that has become immortal, though hardly in the sense anticipated, when he wrote: "I thank God there are no free schools, nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both."

A dark prayer, and answered as fully as men's own acts can fulfill their prayers. The brilliant men who had passed from the scene had no successors. The few malcontents were silenced by a law which made "even the first thrust of the pressman's lever a crime," and until 1729 there was neither printing nor desire for printing in any general sense. The point where our literature began had become apparently its burial-place; the historians and poets and students of an earlier generation were not only unheeded but forgotten, and a hundred years of intellectual barrenness, with another hundred, before even partial recovery could be apparent, were the portion of Virginia and all the states she influenced or controlled. No power could have made it otherwise. "Had much literature been produced there, would it not have been a miracle? The units of the community isolated; little chance for mind to kindle mind; no schools; no literary institutions, high or low; no public libraries; no printing-press; no intellectual freedom; no religious freedom; the forces of society tending to create two great classes—a class of vast land-owners, haughty, hospitable, indolent, passionate, given to field sports and politics; and a class of impoverished white plebeians and black serfs; these constitute a situation out of which may be evolved country gentlemen, loud-lunged and jolly fox-hunters, militia heroes, men of boundless domestic heartiness and social grace, astute and imperious politicians, fiery orators, and, by and by, here and there, perhaps after awhile, a few amateur literary men—-but no literary class, and almost no literature."

* * * * *

The Northern Colony had known strange chances also, but every circumstance and accident of its life fostered the literary spirit and made the student the most honored member of the community. The Mayflower brought a larger proportion of men with literary antecedents and tendencies than had landed on the Virginia coast; and though every detail of life was fuller of hard work, privation and danger—climate being even more against them than Indians or any other misery of the early years—the proportion remained much the same. It is often claimed that this early environment was utterly opposed to any possibility of literary development. On the contrary, "those environments were, for a certain class of mind, extremely wholesome and stimulating." Hawthorne has written somewhere: "New England was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at present, or than it has been within the memory of man." And Tyler, in his brilliant analysis of early colonial forces, takes much the same ground: "There were about them many of the tokens and forces of a picturesque, romantic and impressive life; the infinite solitudes of the wilderness, its mystery, its peace; the near presence of nature, vast, potent, unassailed; the strange problems presented to them by savage character and savage life; their own escape from great cities, from crowds, from mean competition; the luxury of having room enough; the delight of being free; the urgent interest of all the Protestant world in their undertaking; the hopes of humanity already looking thither; the coming to them of scholars, saints, statesmen, philosophers."

Yet even for these men there were restraints that to-day seem shameful and degrading. Harvard College had been made responsible for the good behavior of the printing-press set up in 1639, and for twenty-three years this seemed sufficient. Finally two official licensers were appointed, whose business was to read and pronounce a verdict either for or against everything proposed for publication. Anyone might consider these hindrances sufficient, but intolerance gained with every year of restriction, and when finally the officers were induced by arguments which must have been singularly powerful, to allow the printing of an edition of "Invitation of Christ," a howl arose from every council and general assembly, whether of laws of divinity, and the unlucky book was characterized as one written "by a popish minister, wherein is contained some things that are less safe to be infused amongst the people of this place"; and the authorities ordered not only a revisal of its contents but a cessation of all work on the printing-press. Common sense at length came to the rescue, but legal restraints on printing were not abolished in Massachusetts until twenty-one years before the Declaration of Independence.

As with Virginia the early years were most fertile in work of any interest to the present time, and naturally so. Fresh from the life not only of books but of knowledge of "the central currents of the world's best thinking," these influences could not die out in the generation nearest them. For every writer some history of the Colony was the first instinct, and William Bradford holds the same relation to New England as Captain John Smith to Virginia— the racy, incisive, picturesque diction of the latter being a key- hole to their colonial life, as symbolical as the measured, restrained and solemn periods of the Puritan writer. Argument had become a necessity of life. It had been forced upon them in England in the endeavor to define their position not only to the Cavalier element but to themselves, and became finally so rooted a mental habit that "even on the brink of any momentous enterprise they would stop and argue the case if a suspicion occurred to them that things were not right."

They were never meek and dreamy saints, but, on the contrary, "rather pragmatical and disputatious persons, with all the edges and corners of their characters left sharp, with all their opinions very definitely formed, and with their habits of frank utterance quite thoroughly matured." But for Bradford, and Morton, and Johnson, and other equally worthy and honored names, this disputatious tendency was a surface matter, and the deeper traits were of an order that make petty peculiarities forgotten. For Bradford especially, was "an untroubled command of strong and manly speech.... The daily food of his spirit was noble. He uttered himself without effort, like a free man, a sage and a Christian," and his voice was that of many who followed him. Loving the mother country with passion, the sense of exile long remained with them—a double exile, since they had first taken firm hold in Leyden, and parted from its ease and prosperity with words which hold the pathos and quiet endurance still the undertone of much New England life, and which, though already quoted, are the key note of the early days.

"So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting-place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on these things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, that dearest country, and quieted their spirits."

What John Winthrop's work was like, whether in private diary or letter, or in more formal composition, we have already seen, but there is one speech of his in 1645, which was of profoundest interest to the whole Colony, and must have stirred Anne Bradstreet to the very depths. This speech was made before the general court after his acquittal of the charge of having exceeded his authority as deputy governor. And one passage, containing his statement of the nature of liberty, has been pronounced by both English and American thinkers far beyond the definition of Blackstone, and fully on a par with the noblest utterances of John Locke or Algernon Sidney.

As time went on authorship passed naturally into the hands of the clergy, who came to be the only class with much leisure for study. The range of subjects treated dwindled more and more from year to year. The breadth and vigor of the early days were lost, the pragmatical and disputatious element gaining more and more ground. Unfortunately, "they stood aloof with a sort of horror from the richest and most exhilarating types of classic writing in their own tongue." The Hebrew Scriptures and many classics of Roman and Greek literature were still allowed; but no genuine literary development could take place where the sinewy and vital thought of their own nation was set aside as unworthy of consideration. The esthetic sense dwindled and pined. Standards of judgment altered. The capacity for discrimination lessened. Theological quibbling made much of the literature of the day, though there was much more than quibbling. But the keenest minds, no matter how vivid and beautiful their intelligence, were certain that neither man as a body, nor the world as a home, were anything but lack evils, ruined by the fall of Adam, and to be ignored and despised with every power and faculty. Faith in God came to be faith in "a microscopic and picayune Providence," governing the meanest detail of the elect's existence, and faith in man had no place in any scheme of life or thought. If a poem were written it came to be merely some transcription from the Bible, or an epitaph or elegy on some departed saint.

In spite of themselves, however, humor, the Saxon birthright, refused to be suppressed, and asserted itself in unexpected ways, as in Nathaniel Ward's "Simple Cobbler of Agawam," already mentioned. What the cobbler saw was chiefly the theological difficulties of the time. Discord and confusion seemed to have settled upon the earth, and "looking out over English Christendom, he saw nothing but a chaos of jangling opinions, upstart novelties, lawless manners, illimitable changes in codes, institutions and creeds." He declaims ferociously against freedom of opinion, and "the fathers of the inquisition might have reveled over the first twenty-five pages of this Protestant book, that actually blaze with the eloquent savagery and rapture of religious intolerance." He laughed in the midst of this declamation, but it was rather a sardonic laugh, and soon checked by fresh consideration of man's vileness.

Liberty had received many a blow from the hands of these men, who had fled from home and country to secure it, but it could not die while their own principles were remembered, and constantly at one point or another, irrepressible men and women rose up, bent upon free thought and free speech, and shaming even the most determined and intolerant spirit. One of such men, outspoken by nature, recorded his mind in some two thousand printed pages, and Roger Williams even to-day looms up with all the more power because we have become "rather fatigued by the monotony of so vast a throng of sages and saints, all quite immaculate, all equally prim and stiff in their Puritan starch and uniform, all equally automatic and freezing." It is most comfortable to find anyone defying the rigid and formal law of the time, whether spoken or implied, and we have positive "relief in the easy swing of this man's gait, the limberness of his personal movement, his escape from the pasteboard proprieties, his spontaneity, his impetuosity, his indiscretions, his frank acknowledgements that he really had a few things yet to learn." He demanded spiritual liberty, and though, as time went on, he learned to use gentler phrases, he was always a century or two ahead of his age. The mirthfulness of his early days passed, as well it might, but a better possession— cheerfulness—remained to the end. Exile never embittered him, and the writings that are his legacy "show an habitual upwardness of mental movement; they grow rich in all gentle, gracious, and magnanimous qualities as the years increase upon him."

His influence upon New England was a profound one, and the seed sown bore fruit long after his mortal body had crumbled into dust; but it was chiefly in theological lines, to which all thought now tended. Poetry, so far as drama or lyric verse was concerned, had been forsworn by the soul of every true Puritan, but "of course poetry was planted there too deep even for his theological grub- hooks to root out. If, however, his theology drove poetry out of many forms in which it has been used to reside, poetry itself practiced a noble revenge by taking up its abode in his theology." Stedman gives a masterly analysis of this time in the opening essay of his "Victorian Poets," showing the shackles all minds wore, and comparing the time when "even nature's laws were compelled to bow to church fanaticism," to the happier day in which "science, freedom of thought, refinement and material progress have moved along together."

We have seen how the power of keen and delicate literary judgment or discrimination died insensibly. The first era of literary development passed with the first founders of the Republic, and original thought and expression lay dormant, save in theological directions. As with all new forms of life, the second stage was an imitative one, and the few outside the clergy who essayed writing at all copied the worst models of the Johnsonian period. Verse was still welcome, and the verse-makers of the colonial time were many. Even venerable clergymen like Peter Bulkley gave way to its influence. Ostensible poems were written by more than one governor; John Cotton yielded to the spell, though he hid the fact discreetly by writing his English verses in Greek characters, and confining them to the blank leaves of his almanac. Debarred from ordinary amusements or occupations, the irrepressible need of expression effervesced in rhymes as rugged and unlovely as the writers, and ream upon ream of verse accumulated. Had it found permanent form, our libraries would have been even more encumbered than at present, but fortunately most of it has perished. Elegies and epitaphs were its favorite method, and the "most elaborate and painful jests," every conceivable and some inconceivable quirks and solemn puns made up their substance. The obituary poet of the present is sufficiently conspicuous in the daily papers which are available for his flights, but the leading poets of to-day do not feel that it is incumbent upon them to evolve stanzas in a casual way on every mournful occasion. In that elder day allegories, anagrams, acrostics—all intended to have a consolatory effect on mourning friends—flowed from every clerical pen, adding a new terror to death and a new burden to life, but received by the readers with a species of solemn glee. Of one given to this habit Cotton Mather writes that he "had so nimble a faculty of putting his devout thoughts into verse that he signalized himself by ... sending poems to all persons, in all places, on all occasions ... wherein if the curious relished the piety sometimes rather than the poetry, the capacity of the most therein to be accommodated must be considered." Another poet had presently the opportunity to "embalm his memory in some congenial verses," and wrote an epitaph, and ended with a full description of—

"His care to guide his flock and feed his lambs, By words, works, prayers, psalms, alms and anagrams."

To this period belongs a poetic phenomenon—a metrical horror known as "The Bay Psalm Book," being the first English book ever issued from an American printing-press. Tyler has given with his accustomed happy facility of phrase the most truthful description yet made of a production that formed for years the chief poetical reading of the average New Englander, and undoubtedly did more to lower taste and make inferior verse seem praiseworthy than any and all other causes. He writes: "In turning over these venerable pages, one suffers by sympathy something of the obvious toil of the undaunted men who, in the very teeth of nature, did all this; and whose appalling sincerity must, in our eyes, cover a multitude of such sins as sentences wrenched about end for end, clauses heaved up and abandoned in chaos, words disemboweled or split quite in two in the middle, and dissonant combinations of sound that are the despair of such poor vocal organs as are granted to human beings. The verses seem to have been hammered out on an anvil, by blows from a blacksmith's sledge. In all parts of the book is manifest the agony it cost the writers to find two words that would rhyme—-more or less; and so often as this arduous feat is achieved, the poetic athlete appears to pause awhile from sheer exhaustion, panting heavily for breath. Let us now read, for our improvement, a part of the Fifty-eighth Psalm:

"The wicked are estranged from the womb, they goe astray as soon as ever they are borne, uttering lyes are they. Their poyson's like serpents' poyson, they like deafe Aspe her eare that stops. Though Charmer wisely charm, his voice she will not heare. Within their mouth, doe thou their teeth, break out, O God most strong, doe thou Jehovah, the great teeth break of the lions young."

It is small wonder that Anne Bradstreet's poems struck the unhappy New Englanders who had been limited to verse of this description as the work of one who could be nothing less than the "Tenth Muse." When the first edition of her poems appeared, really in 1650, though the date is usually given as 1642, a younger generation had come upon the scene. The worst hardships were over. Wealth had accumulated, and the comfort which is the distinguishing characteristic of New England homes to-day, was well established. Harvard College was filled with bright young scholars, in whom her work awakened the keenest enthusiasm; who had insight enough to recognize her as the one shining example of poetic power in that generation, and who wrote innumerable elegies and threnodies on her life and work.

The elegy seems to have appealed more strongly to the Puritan mind than any other poetical form, and they exhausted every verbal device in perpetuating the memory of friends who scarcely needed this new terror added to a death already surrounded by a gloom that even their strongest faith hardly dispelled.

"Let groans inspire my quill," one clerical twister of language began, and another wrote with the painful and elephantine lightness which was the Puritan idea of humor, an epitaph which may serve as sufficient illustration of the whole unutterably dreary mass of verse:

"Gospel and law in's heart had each its column; His head an index to the sacred volume; His very name a title page and next His life a commentary on the text. Oh, what a monument of glorious worth, When in a new edition he comes forth Without erratas may we think he'll be, In leaves and covers of eternity."

Better examples were before them, for books were imported freely, but minds had settled into the mould which they kept for more than one generation, unaffected in slightest measure by the steady progress of thought in the old home.

The younger writers were influenced to a certain degree by the new school, but lacked power to pass beyond it. Pope was now in full tide of success, and, with Thomson, Watts and Young, found hosts of sympathetic and admiring readers who would have turned in horror from the pages of Shakespeare or the early dramatists. The measure adopted by Pope charmed the popular mind, and while it helped to smooth the asperities of Puritan verse, became also the easy vehicle of the commonplace. There were hints here and there of something better to come, and in the many examples of verse remaining it is easy to discern a coming era of free thought and more musical expression. Peter Folger had sent out from the fogs of Nantucket a defiant and rollicking voice; John Rogers and Urian Oakes, both poets and both Harvard presidents, had done something better than mere rhyme, but it remained for another pastor, teacher and physician to sound a note that roused all New England. Michael Wigglesworth might have been immortal, could the genius born in him have been fed and trained by any of the "sane and mighty masters of English song"; but, born to the inheritance of a narrow and ferocious creed, with no power left to even admit the existence of the beautiful, he was "forever incapable of giving utterance to his genius—except in a dialect unworthy of it," and became simply "the explicit and unshrinking rhymer of the five points of Calvinism."

Cotton Mather describes him as "a feeble little shadow of a man." He was "the embodiment of what was great, earnest and sad in colonial New England." He was tenderly sympathetic, and his own life, made up mostly of sorrow and pain, filled him with longing to help others. "A sensitive, firm, wide-ranging, unresting spirit, he looks out mournfully over the throngs of men that fill the world, all of them totally depraved, all of them caught, from farthest eternity, in the adamantine meshes of God's decrees; the most of them also being doomed in advance by those decrees to an endless existence of ineffable torment; and upon this situation of affairs the excellent Michael Wigglesworth proposes to make poetry." His "Day of Doom," a horribly realistic description of every terror of the expected judgment, was written in a swinging ballad measure that took instant hold of the popular mind. No book ever printed in America has met with a proportionate commercial success. "The eighteen hundred copies of the first edition were sold within a single year; which implies the purchase of a copy of 'The Day of Doom' by at least every thirty-fifth person in New England.... Since that time the book has been repeatedly published, at least once in England and at least eight times in America, the last time being in 1867."

It penetrated finally all parts of the country where Puritan faith or manners prevailed. It was an intellectual influence far beyond anything we can now imagine. It was learned by heart along with the catechism, and for a hundred years was found on every book- shelf, no matter how sparsely furnished otherwise. Even after the Revolution, which produced the usual effect of all war in bringing in unrestrained thought, it was still a source of terror, and thrilled and prepared all readers for the equally fearful pictures drawn by Edwards and his successors.

It is fortunate, perhaps, that Anne Bradstreet did not live to read and be influenced by this poem, as simply candid in its form and conception as the "Last Judgements" of the early masters, and like them, portraying devils with much more apparent satisfaction than saints. There is one passage that deserves record as evidence of what the Puritan faith had done toward paralyzing common sense, though there are still corners in the United States where it would be read without the least sense of its grotesque horror. The various classes of sinners have all been attended to, and now, awaiting the last relay of offenders—

"With dismal chains, and strongest reins Like prisoners of hell, They're held in place before Christ's face, Till he their doom shall tell. These void of tears, but filled with fears, And dreadful expectation Of endless pains and scalding flames, Stand waiting for damnation."

The saints have received their place and look with an ineffable and satisfied smirk on the despair of the sinners, all turning at last to gaze upon the battalion of "reprobate infants," described in the same brisk measure:

"Then to the bar all they drew near Who died in infancy, And never had, or good or bad, Effected personally. But from the womb unto the tomb Were straightway carried, Or, at the least, ere they transgressed— Who thus began to plead."

These infants, appalled at what lies before them, begin to first argue with true Puritanic subtlety, and finding this useless, resort to pitiful pleadings, which result in a slight concession, though the unflinching Michael gives no hint of what either the Judge or his victims would regard as "the easiest room." The infants receive their sentence with no further remark.

"You sinners are; and such a share As sinners may expect; Such you shall have, for I do save None but mine own elect.

Yet to compare your sin with their Who lived a longer time, I do confess yours is much less, Though every sin's a crime.

A crime it is; therefore in bliss You may not hope to dwell; But unto you I shall allow The easiest room in hell."

In such faith the little Bradstreets were brought up, and the oldest, who became a minister, undoubtedly preached it with the gusto of the time, and quoted the final description of the sufferings of the lost, as an efficient argument with sinners:

"Then might you hear them rend and tear The air with their outcries; The hideous noise of their sad voice, Ascendeth to the skies. They wring their hands, their cartiff-hands, And gnash their teeth for terror; They cry, they roar, for anguish sore, And gnaw their tongue for horror. But get away without delay; Christ pities not your cry; Depart to hell, there may you yell And roar eternally.

* * * * *

"Die fain they would, if die they could, But death will not be had; God's direful wrath their bodies hath Forever immortal made. They live to lie in misery And bear eternal woe; And live they must whilst God is just That he may plague them so."

Of the various literary children who may be said to have been nurtured on Anne Bradstreet's verses, three became leaders of New England thought, and all wrote elegies on her death, one of them of marked beauty and power. It remained for a son of the sulphurous Wigglesworth, to leave the purest fragment of poetry the epoch produced, the one flower of a life, which at once buried itself in the cares of a country pastorate and gave no further sign of gift or wish to speak in verse. The poem records the fate of a gifted classmate, who graduated with him at Harvard, sailed for England, and dying on the return voyage, was buried at sea. It is a passionate lamentation, an appeal to Death, and at last a quiet resignation to the inevitable, the final lines having a music and a pathos seldom found in the crabbed New England verse:

"Add one kind drop unto his watery tomb; Weep, ye relenting eyes and ears; See, Death himself could not refrain, But buried him in tears."

With him the eighteenth century opens, beyond which we have no present interest, such literary development as made part of Anne Bradstreet's knowledge ending with the seventeenth.



CHAPTER VIII.

SOME PHASES OF EARLY COLONIAL LIFE.

Much of the depression evident in Anne Bradstreet's earlier verses came from the circumstances of her family life. No woman could have been less fitted to bear absence from those nearest to her, and though her adhesive nature had made her take as deep root in Ipswich, as if further change could not come, she welcomed anything that diminished the long separations, and made her husband's life center more at home. One solace seems to have been always open to her, her longest poem, the "Four Monarchies," showing her devotion to Ancient history and the thoroughness with which she had made it her own. Anatomy seems to have been studied also, the "Four Humours in Man's Constitution," showing an intimate acquaintance with the anatomical knowledge of the day; but in both cases it was not, as one might infer from her references to Greek and Latin authors, from original sources. Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," Archbishop Usher's "Annals of the World," and Pemble's "Period of the Persian Monarchy," were all found in Puritan libraries, though she may have had access to others while still in England. Pemble was in high favor as an authority in Biblical exposition, the title of his book being a stimulant to every student of the prophecies: "The Period of the Persian Monarchy, wherein sundry places of Ezra, Nehemiah and Daniel are cleared, Extracted, contracted and Englished, (much of it out of Dr. Raynolds) by the late learned and godly man, Mr. William Pemble, of Magdalen Hall, in Oxford."

This she read over and over again, and many passages in her poem on the "Four Monarchies" are merely paraphrases of this and Raleigh's work, though before a second edition was printed she had read Plutarch, and altered here and there as she saw fit to introduce his rendering. Galen and Hippocrates, whom she mentions familiarly, were known to her through the work of the "curious learned Crooke," his "Description of the Body of Man, Collected and Translated out of all the best Authors on Anatomy, especially out of Gasper, Banchinus, and A. Sourentius," being familiar to all students of the day.

If her muse could but have roused to a sense of what was going on about her, and recorded some episodes which Winthrop dismisses with a few words, we should be under obligations that time could only deepen. Why, for instance, could she not have given her woman's view of that indomitable "virgin mother of Taunton," profanely described by Governor Winthrop as "an ancient maid, one Mrs. Poole. She went late thither, and endured much hardships, and lost much cattle. Called, after, Taunton."

Precisely why Mrs. Poole chose Tecticutt, afterward Titicut, for her venture is not known, but the facts of her rash experiment must have been discussed at length, and moved less progressive maids and matrons to envy or pity as the chance might be. But not a hint of this surprising departure can be found in any of Mistress Bradstreet's remains, and it stands, with no comment save that of the diligent governor's faithful pen, as the first example of an action, to be repeated in these later days in prairie farms and Western ranches by women who share the same spirit, though more often young than "ancient" maids. But ancient, though in her case a just enough characterization, was a term of reproach for any who at sixteen or eighteen at the utmost, remained unmarried, and our present custom of calling every maiden under forty, "girl" would have struck the Puritan mothers with a sense of preposterousness fully equal to ours at some of their doings.

A hundred years passed, and then an appreciative kinsman, who had long enjoyed the fruit of her labors, set up "a faire slab," still to be seen in the old burying ground.

HERE RESTS THE REMAINS

OF

MRS. ELIZABETH POOL,

A NATIVE OF OLD ENGLAND,

Of good family, friends and prospects, all which she left in the prime of her life, to enjoy the religion of her conscience in this distant wilderness;

A great proprietor of the township of Taunton,

A chief promoter of its settlement and its incorporation 1639-40,

about which time she settled near this spot; and,

having employed the opportunity

of her virgin state in piety, liberality and sanctity of manners,

Died May 21st A.D. 1654, aged 65.

to whose memory

this monument is gratefully erected by her next of kin,

JOHN BORLAND, ESQUIRE,

A.D. 1771.

Undoubtedly every detail of this eccentric settlement was talked over at length, as everything was talked over. Gossip never had more forcible reason for existence, for the church covenant compelled each member to a practical oversight of his neighbor's concerns, the special clause reading: "We agree to keep mutual watch and ward over one another."

At first, united by a common peril, the dangers of this were less perceptible. The early years held their own necessities for discussion, and the records of the time are full of matter that Anne Bradstreet might have used had she known her opportunity. She was weighed down like every conscientious Puritan of the day not only by a sense of the infinitely great, but quite as strenuously by the infinitely little. It is plain that she saw more clearly than many of her time, and there are no indications in her works of the small superstitions held by all. Superstition had changed its name to Providence, and every item of daily action was believed to be under the constant supervision and interference of the Almighty. The common people had ceased to believe in fairies and brownies, but their places had been filled by Satan's imps and messengers, watchful for some chance to confound the elect.

The faith in dreams and omens of every sort was not lessened by the transferrence of the responsibility for them to the Lord, and the superstition of the day, ended later in a credulity that accepted the Salem Witchcraft delusion with all its horrors, believing always, that diligent search would discover, if not the Lord's, then the devil's hand, working for the edification or confounding of the elect. Even Winthrop does not escape, and in the midst of wise suggestions for the management of affairs sandwiches such a record as the following: "At Watertown there was (in the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake; and after a long fight, the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: That the snake was the devil; the mouse was a poor, contemptible, people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here, and dispossess him of his kingdom. Upon the same occasion, he told the governor that, before he was resolved to come into this country, he dreamed he was here, and that he saw a church arise out of the earth, which grew up and became a marvelously goodly church."

They had absolute faith that prayer would accomplish all things, even to strengthening a defective memory. Thomas Shepard, whose autobiography is given in Young's "Chronicles of Massachusetts Bay," gave this incident in his life when a student and "ambitious of learning and being a scholar; and hence, when I could not take notes of the sermon I remember I was troubled at it, and prayed the Lord earnestly that he would help me to note sermons; and I see some cause of wondering at the Lord's providence therein; for as soon as ever I had prayed (after my best fashion) Him for it, I presently, the next Sabbath, was able to take notes, who the precedent Sabbath, could do nothing at all that way."

Anthony Thacher, whose story may have been told in person to Governor Dudley's family, and whose written description of his shipwreck, included in Young's "Chronicles," is one of the most picturesque pieces of writing the time affords, wrote, with a faith that knew no question: "As I was sliding off the rock into the sea the Lord directed my toes into a joint in the rock's side, as also the tops of some of my fingers, with my right hand, by means whereof, the wave leaving me, I remained so, hanging on the rock, only my head above water."

When individual prayer failed to accomplish a desired end, a fast and the united storming of heaven, never failed to bring victory to the besiegers. Thus Winthrop writes: "Great harm was done in corn, (especially wheat and barley) in this month, by a caterpillar, like a black worm about an inch and a half long. They eat up first the blades of the stalk, then they eat up the tassels, whereupon the ear withered. It was believed by divers good observers, that they fell in a great thunder shower, for divers yards and other places, where not one of them was to be seen an hour before, were immediately after the shower almost covered with them, besides grass places where they were not so easily discerned. They did the most harm in the southern parts.... In divers places the churches kept a day of humiliation, and presently after, the caterpillars vanished away."

Still another instance, the fame of which spread through the whole Colony and confounded any possible doubter, found record in the "Magnalia", that storehouse of fact so judiciously combined with fable that the author himself could probably never tell what he had himself seen, and what had been gleaned from others. Mr. John Wilson, the minister of the church at Boston until the arrival of Cotton, was journeying with a certain Mr. Adams, when tidings came to the latter of the probably fatal illness of his daughter. "Mr. Wilson, looking up to heaven, began mightily to wrestle with God for the life of the young woman ... then, turning himself about unto Mr. Adams, 'Brother,' said he, 'I trust your daughter shall live; I believe in God she shall recover of this sickness.' And so it marvelously came to pass, and she is now the fruitful mother of several desirable children."

Among the books brought over by John Winthrop the younger, was a volume containing the Greek testament, the Psalms, and the English Common Prayer, bound together, to which happened an accident, which was gravely described by the Governor in his daily history of events:

"Decem 15. About this time there fell out a thing worthy of observation. Mr. Winthrop the younger, one of the magistrates, having many books in a chamber where there was corn of divers sorts, had among them one, wherein the Greek testament, the psalms and the common prayer were bound together. He found the common prayer eaten with mice, every leaf of it, and not any of the two other touched, nor any other of his books, though there were above a thousand. Not a Puritan of them all, unless it may be the governor himself, but believed that the mice were agents of the Almighty sent to testify His dissatisfaction with the objectionable form of prayer, and not a fact in daily life but became more and more the working of Providence. Thus, as the good governor records later:

"A godly woman of the church of Boston, dwelling sometimes in London, brought with her a parcel of very fine linen of great value, which she set her heart too much upon, and had been at charge to have it all newly washed, and curiously folded and pressed, and so left it in press in her parlor over night. She had a negro maid went into the room very late, and let fall some snuff of the candle upon the linen, so as by morning all the linen was burned to tinder, and the boards underneath, and some stools and a part of the wainscot burned and never perceived by any in the house, though some lodged in the chamber overhead, and no ceiling between. But it pleased God that the loss of this linen did her much good, both in taking off her heart from worldly comforts, and in preparing her for a far greater affliction by the untimely death of her husband, who was slain not long after at Isle of Providence."

The thrifty housewife's heart goes out to this sister, whose "curiously folded and pressed linen," lavender-scented and fair, was the one reminder of the abounding and generous life from which she had come. It may have been a comfort to consider its loss a direct dispensation for her improvement, and by this time, natural causes were allowed to have no existence save as they became tools of this "Wonder-working Providence." It was the day of small things more literally than they knew, and in this perpetual consideration of small things, the largeness of their first purpose dwindled and contracted, and inconceivable pettiness came at last to be the seal upon much of their action. Mr. Johnson, a minister whose course is commented upon by Bradford, excommunicated his brother and own father, for disagreement from him in certain points of doctrine, though the same zeal weakened when called upon to act against his wife, who doubtless had means of influencing his judgment unknown to the grave elders who remonstrated. But the interest was as strong in the cut of a woman's sleeve as in the founding of a new Plantation. They mourned over their own degeneracy. "The former times were better than these," the croakers sighed, and Governor Bradford wrote of this special case; "In our time his wife was a grave matron, and very modest both in her apparel and all her demeanor, ready to any good works in her place, and helpful to many, especially the poor, and an ornament to his calling. She was a young widow when he married her, and had been a merchant's wife by whom he had a good estate, and was a godly woman; and because she wore such apparel as she had been formerly used to, which were neither excessive nor immodest, for their chiefest exception were against her wearing of some whalebone in the bodice and sleeves of her gown, corked shoes and other such like things as the citizens of her rank then used to wear. And although, for offence sake, she and he were willing to reform the fashions of them, so far as might be, without spoiling of their garments, yet it would not content them except they came full up to their size. Such was the strictness or rigidness (as now the term goes) of some in those times, as we can by experience and of our own knowledge, show in other instances."

Governor Bradford, who evidently leans in his own mind toward the side of Mistress Johnson, proceeds to show the undue severity of some of the brethren in Holland. "We were in the company of a godly man that had been a long time prisoner at Norwich for this cause, and was by Judge Cooke set at liberty. After going into the country he visited his friends, and returning that way again to go into the Low Countries by ship at Yarmouth, and so desired some of us to turn in with him to the house of an ancient woman in the city, who had been very kind and helpful to him in his sufferings. She knowing his voice, made him very welcome, and those with him. But after some time of their entertainment, being ready to depart, she came up to him and felt of his hand (for her eyes were dim with age) and perceiving it was something stiffened with starch, she was much displeased and reproved him very sharply, fearing God would not prosper his journey. Yet the man was a plain country man, clad in gray russet, without either welt or guard (as the proverb is) and the band he wore, scarce worth three-pence, made of their own home-spinning; and he was godly and humble as he was plain. What would such professors, if they were now living, say to the excess of our times?"

Women spoke their minds much more freely in the early days than later they were allowed to, this same "ancient woman" of Amsterdam, having a sister worker of equally uncompromising tongue and tendencies, who was, for her various virtues chosen as deaconess, "and did them service for many years, though she was sixty years of age when she was chosen. She honored her place and was an ornament to the congregation. She usually sat in a convenient place in the congregation, with a little birchen rod in her hand, and kept little children in great awe from disturbing the congregation. She did frequently visit the sick and weak, especially women, and, as there was need, called out maids and young women to watch and do them other helps as their necessity did require; and if they were poor, she would gather relief for them of those that were able, or acquaint the deacons; and she was obeyed as a mother in Israel and an officer of Christ."

Whether this dame had the same objection to starch as the more "ancient" one, is not recorded, but in any case she was not alone. Men and women alike, forswore the desired stiffness, retaining it only in their opinions. By the time that Anne Bradstreet had settled in Andover, bodily indulgence so far as adornment or the gratification of appetite went, had become a matter for courts to decide upon. Whether Simon Bradstreet gave up the curling locks which, while not flowing to his shoulders as in Colonel Hutchinson's case, still fell in thick rings about his neck, we have no means of knowing. His wife would naturally protest against the cropping, brought about by the more extreme, "who put their own cropped heads together in order to devise some scheme for compelling all other heads to be as well shorn as theirs were."

One of the first acts of John Endecott when again appointed governor of Massachusetts Bay, was "to institute a solemn association against long hair," but his success was indifferent, as evidenced in many a moan from reverend ministers and deacons. John Eliot, one of the sweetest and most saintly spirits among them, wrote that it was a "luxurious feminine prolixity for men to wear their hair long and to ... ruffle their heads in excesses of this kind," but in later years, with many another wearied antagonist of this abomination, added hopelessly—"the lust is insuperable." Tobacco was fulminated against with equal energy, but no decree of court could stamp out the beloved vice. Winthrop yielded to it, but afterward renounced it, and the ministers compared its smoke to the smoke ascending from the bottomless pit, but no denunciation could effectually bar it out, and tobacco and starch in the end asserted their right to existence and came into constant use. A miraculous amount of energy had been expended upon the heinousness of their use, and the very fury of protest brought a reaction equally strong. Radical even in her conservatism, New England sought to bind in one, two hopelessly incompatible conditions: intellectual freedom and spiritual slavery. Absolute obedience to an accepted formula of faith was hardly likely to remain a fact for a community where thought was stimulated not only by education and training but every circumstance of their daily lives. A people who had lived on intimate terms with the innermost counsels of the Almighty, and who listened for hours on Sunday to speculations on the component elements not only of the Almighty, but of all His works were, while apparently most reverential, losing all capacity for reverence in any ancient sense. Undoubtedly this very speculation did much to give breadth and largeness, too much belief preparing the way, first, for no belief, and, at last, for a return to the best in the old and a combination of certain features of the new, which seems destined to make something better for practical as well as spiritual life than the world has ever known.

The misfortune of the early Puritan was in too rigid a creed, too settled an assurance that all the revelation needed had been given. Unlike the Dunkard elders, who refused to formulate a creed, lest it should put them in a mental attitude that would hinder further glimpses of truth, they hastened to bind themselves and all generations to come in chains, which began to rattle before the last link was forged. Not a Baptist, or Quaker, or Antinomian but gave himself to the work of protestation, and the determined effort to throw off the tyranny and presumption of men no wiser than he. Whippings, imprisonments and banishments silenced these spirits temporarily, but the vibration of particles never ceased, and we know the final result of such action. No wonder that the silent work of disintegration, when it showed itself in the final apparent collapse of all creeds, was looked upon with horrified amazement, and a hasty gathering up of all the old particles with a conviction that fusing and forging again was as easy of accomplishment now as in the beginning. The attempt has proved their error.

Up to nearly the opening of the eighteenth century New England life kept pace with the advances in England. There was constant coming and going and a sense of common interests and common needs. But even before emigration practically ceased, the changes in modes of speech were less marked than in the old home. English speech altered in many points during the seventeenth century. Words dropped out of use, their places filled by a crowd of claimants, sometimes admitted after sharp scrutiny, as often denied, but ending in admitting themselves, as words have a trick of doing even when most thoroughly outlawed. But in New England the old methods saw no reason for change.

Forms of speech current in the England of the seventeenth century crystallized here and are heard to-day. "Yankeeisms" is their popular title, but the student of old English knows them rather as "Anglicisms." "Since the year 1640 the New England race has not received any notable addition to its original stock, and to-day their Anglican blood is as genuine and unmixed as that of any county in England."

Dr. Edward Freeman, in his "Impressions of America," says of New England particularly, the remark applying in part also to all the older states: "When anything that seems strange to a British visitor in American speech or American manners is not quite modern on the face of it, it is pretty certain to be something which was once common to the older and the newer England, but which the newer England has kept, while the older England has cast it aside." Such literature as had birth in New England adhered chiefly to the elder models, and has thus an archaic element that broader life and intercourse would have eliminated. The provincial stage, of feeble and uncertain, or stilled but equally uncertain expression was at hand, but for the first generation or so the colonists had small time to consider forms of speech. Their passion for knowledge, however, took on all the vitality that had forsaken English ground, and that from that day to this, has made the first thought of every New England community, East or West, a school. Their corner-stone "rested upon a book." It has been calculated that there was one Cambridge graduate for every two- hundred and fifty inhabitants, and within six years from the landing of John Winthrop and his party, Harvard College had begun its work of baffling "that old deluder, Sathan," whose business in part it was "to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures." To secular learning they were indifferent, but every man must be able to give reason for the faith that was in him, and the more tongues in which such statement could be made the more confusion for this often embarrassed but still undismayed Sathan. Orders of nobility among them had passed. Very rarely were they joined by even a simple "Sir," and as years went on, nobility came to be synonymous with tyranny, and there was less and less love for every owner of a title. To them the highest earthly distinction came to be found in the highest learning. The earnest student deserved and obtained all the honors that man could give him, and his epitaph even recorded the same solemn and deep-seated admiration. "The ashes of an hard student, a good scholar, and a great Christian."

Anne Bradstreet shared this feeling to the full, and might easily have been the mother of whom Mather writes as saying to her little boy: "Child, if God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that thy mother ever asked for thee." Simon Bradstreet became both, and in due time pleased his mother by turning sundry of her "Meditations" into Latin prose, in which stately dress they are incorporated in her works. The New England woman kept up as far as possible the same pursuits in which she had been trained, and among others the concoction of innumerable tinctures and waters, learned in the 'still-room' of every substantial English home. Room might have given place to a mere corner, but the work went on with undiminished interest and enthusiasm. There were few doctors, and each family had its own special formulas—infallible remedies for all ordinary diseases and used indiscriminately and in combination where a case seemed to demand active treatment. They believed in their own medicines absolutely, and required equal faith in all upon whom they bestowed them.

Sturdy English stock as were all these New England dames, and blessed with a power of endurance which it required more than one generation to lessen, they were as given to medicine-taking as their descendants of to-day, and fully as certain that their own particular prescription was more efficacious than all the rest put together. Anne Bradstreet had always been delicate, and as time went on grew more and more so. The long voyage and confinement to salt food had developed certain tendencies that never afterward left her, and there is more than a suspicion that scurvy had attacked her among the rest. Every precaution was taken by Governor Winthrop to prevent such danger for those who came later, and he writes to his wife, directing her preparations for the voyage: "Be sure to be warme clothed & to have store of fresh provisions, meale, eggs putt up in salt or ground mault, butter, ote meal, pease & fruits, & a large strong chest or 2, well locked, to keep these provisions in; & be sure they be bestowed in the shippe where they may be readyly come by.... Be sure to have ready at sea 2 or 3 skilletts of several syzes, a large fryinge panne, a small stewinge panne, & a case to boyle a pudding in; store of linnen for use at sea, & sacke to bestow among the saylors: some drinking vessells & peuter & other vessells."

Dr. Nathaniel Wright, a famous physician of Hereford, and private physician to Oliver Cromwell for a time, had given Winthrop various useful prescriptions, and his medicines were in general use, Winthrop adding in this letter: "For physick you shall need no other but a pound of Doctor Wright's Electuariu lenitivu, & his direction to use it, a gallon of scirvy grasse, to drink a litle 5 or 6 morninges together, with some saltpeter dissolved in it, & a little grated or sliced nutmeg."

Dr. Wright's prescriptions were supplemented by a collection prepared for him by Dr. Edward Stafford of London, all of which were used with great effect, the governor's enthusiasm for medical receipts and amateur practice, passing on through several generations. A letter to his son John at Ispwich contains some of his views and a prescription for pills which were undoubtedly taken faithfully by Mistress Anne and administered as faithfully to the unwilling Simon, who like herself suffered from one or two attacks of fever. The colonists were, like all breakers of new ground, especially susceptible to fevers of every variety, and Governor Winthrop writes anxiously: "You must be very careful of taking cold about the loins; & when the ground is open, I will send you some pepper-wort roots. For the flux, there is no better medicine than the cup used two or three times, &, in case of sudden torments, a clyster of a quart of water boiled to a pint, which, with the quantity of two or three nutmegs of saltpetre boiled in it, will give present ease.

"For the pills, they are made of grated pepper, made up with turpentine, very stiff, and some flour withal; and four or five taken fasting, & fast two hours after. But if there be any fever with the flux, this must not be used till the fever is removed by the cup."

Each remedy bears the internal warrant of an immediate need for a fresh one, and it is easy to see from what source the national love of patent medicines has been derived. Another prescription faithfully tried by both giver and receiver, and which Anne Bradstreet may have tested in her various fevers, was sent to John Winthrop, Jr., by Sir Kenelm Digby and may be found with various other singularities in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. "For all sorts of agues, I have of late tried the following magnetical experiment with infallible success. Pare the patient's nails when the fit is coming on, and put the parings into a little bag of fine linen or sarsenet, and tie that about a live eel's neck in a tub of water. The eel will die and the patient will recover. And if a dog or hog eat that eel, they will also die. I have known one that cured all deliriums and frenzies whatsoever, and at once taking, with an elixer made of dew, nothing but dew purified & nipped up in a glass & digested 15 months till all of it was become a gray powder, not one drop of humidity remaining. This I know to be true, & that first it was as black as ink, then green, then gray, & at 22 month's end it was as white & lustrous as any oriental pearl. But it cured manias at 15 months' end."

The mania for taking it or anything else sufficiently mysterious and unpleasant to give a value to its possession remains to this day. But the prescriptions made up by the chief magistrate had a double efficacy for a time that believed a king's touch held instant cure for the king's evil, and that the ordinary marks known to every physician familiar with the many phases of hysteria, were the sign-manual of witches. The good governor's list of remedies had been made up from the Stafford prescriptions, the diseases he arranged to deal with being "plague, smallpox, fevers, king's evil, insanity, and falling sickness," besides broken bones and all ordinary injuries.

Simples and mineral drugs are used indiscriminately, and there is one remedy on which Dr. Holmes comments, in an essay on "The Medical Profession in Massachusetts," "made by putting live toads into an earthern pot so as to half fill it, and baking and burning them 'in the open ayre, not in a house'—concerning which latter possibility I suspect Madam Winthrop would have had something to say—until they could be reduced by pounding, first into a brown and then into a black, powder." This powder was the infallible remedy "against the plague, small-pox; purples, all sorts of feavers; Poyson; either by way of Prevention or after Infection." Consumption found a cure in a squirrel, baked alive and also reduced to a Powder, and a horrible witches' broth of earth-worms and other abominations served the same purpose. The governor makes no mention of this, but he gives full details of an electuary of millipedes, otherwise sowbugs, which seems to have been used with distinguished success. Coral and amber were both powdered and used in special cases, and antimony and nitre were handled freely, with rhubarb and the whole series of ancient remedies. The Winthrop papers hold numberless letters from friends and patients testifying to the good he had done them or begging for further benefactions, one of these from the agitator, Samuel Gostun, who at eighty-two had ceased to trouble himself over anything but his own infirmities, holding a wonder how "a thing so little in quantity, so little in sent, so little in taste, and so little to sence in operation, should beget and bring forth such efects."

These prescriptions were handed down through four generations of Winthrops, who seem to have united law and medicine, a union less common than that of divinity and medicine.

Michael Wigglesworth, whom we know best through his "Day of Doom," visited and prescribed for the sick, "not only as a Pastor but as a Physician too, and this not only in his own town, but also in all those of the vicinity." But this was in later days, when John Eliot's desire had been accomplished, written to the Rev. Mr. Shepard in 1647: "I have thought in my heart that it were a very singular good work, if the Lord would stirre up the hearts of some or other of his people in England, to give some maintenance toward some Schoole or Collegiate exercise this way, wherein there should be Anatomies and other instructions that way, and where there might be some recompense given to any that should bring in any vegetable or other thing that is vertuous in the way of Physick. There is another reason which moves my thought and desires this way, namely, that our young students in Physick may be trained up better than they yet bee, who have onely theoreticall knowledge, and are forced to fall to practice before ever they saw an Anatomy made, or duely trained up in making experiments, for we never had but one Anatomy in the countrey."

This anatomy had been made by Giles Firmin, who was the friend of Winthrop and of the Bradstreet's, and who found the practice of medicine so little profitable that he wrote to the former: "I am strongly set upon to studye divinity; my studyes else must be lost, for physick is but a meene helpe." A "meene helpe" it proved for many years, during which the Puritan dames steeped herbs and made ointments and lotions after formulas learned in the still- room at home. The little Bradstreet's doubtless swallowed their full share, though fortunately blessed for the most part with the sturdy constitution of their father, who, save for a fever or two, escaped most of the sicknesses common to the colonists and lived through many serene and untroubled years of physical and mental health, finding life enjoyable even at four-score and ten.



CHAPTER IX.

ANDOVER.

What causes may have led to the final change of location we have no means of knowing definitely, save that every Puritan desired to increase the number of churches as much as possible; a tendency inherited to its fullest by their descendants. On the 4th of March, 1634-5, "It is ordered that the land aboute Cochichowicke, shall be reserved for an inland plantacon, & that whosoever will goe to inhabite there, shall have three yeares imunity from all taxes, levyes, publique charges & services whatsoever, (millitary dissipline onely excepted), etc."

Here is the first suggestion of what was afterward to become Andover, but no action was taken by Bradstreet until 1638, when in late September, "Mr. Bradstreet, Mr. Dudley, Junior, Captain Dennison, Mr. Woodbridge and eight others, are allowed (upon their petition) to begin a plantation at Merrimack."

This plantation grew slowly. The Bradstreets lingered at Ipswich, and the formal removal, the last of many changes, did not take place until September, 1644. Simon Bradstreet, the second son, afterward minister at New London, Conn., whose manuscript diary is a curious picture of the time, gives one or two details which aid in fixing the date.

"1640. I was borne N. England, at Ipswitch, Septem. 28 being Munday 1640.

"1651. I had my Education in the same Town at the free School, the master of w'ch was my ever respected ffreind Mr. Ezekiell Cheevers. My Father was removed from Ipsw. to Andover, before I was putt to school, so yt my schooling was more chargeable."

The thrifty spirit of his grandfather Dudley is shown in the final line, but Simon Bradstreet the elder never grudged the cost of anything his family needed or could within reasonable bounds desire, and stands to-day as one of the most signal early examples of that New England woman's ideal, "a good provider."

Other threads were weaving themselves into the "sad-colored" web of daily life, the pattern taking on new aspects as the days went on. Four years after the landing of the Arbella and her consorts, one of the many bands of Separatists, who followed their lead, came over, the celebrated Thomas Parker, one of the chief among them, and his nephew, John Woodbridge, an equally important though less distinguished member of the party. They took up land at Newbury, and settled to their work of building up a new home, as if no other occupation had ever been desired.

The story of John Woodbridge is that of hundreds of young Puritans who swelled the tide of emigration that between 1630 and 1640 literally poured into the country, "thronging every ship that pointed its prow thitherward." Like the majority of them, he was of good family and of strong individuality, as must needs be where a perpetual defiance is waged against law and order as it showed itself to the Prelatical party. He had been at Oxford and would have graduated, but for his own and his father's unwillingness that he should take the oath of conformity required, and in the midst of his daily labor, he still hoped privately to become one of that ministry, who were to New England what the House of Lords represented to the old. Prepossessing in appearance, with a singularly mild and gentle manner, he made friends on all sides, and in a short time came to be in great favor with Governor Dudley, whose daughter Mercy was then nearly the marriagable age of the time, sixteen. The natural result followed, and Mercy Dudley, in 1641, became Mercy Woodbridge, owning that name for fifty years, and bearing, like most Puritan matrons, many children, with the well marked traits that were also part of the time.

The young couple settled quietly at Newbury, but his aspiration was well known and often discussed by the many who desired to see the churches increased with greater speed. Dudley was one of the most earnest workers in this direction, but there is a suggestion that the new son-in-law's capacity for making a good bargain had influenced his feelings, and challenged the admiration all good New Englanders have felt from the beginning for any "fore handed" member of their community. This, however, was only a weakness among many substantial virtues which gave him a firm place in the memory of his parishioners. But the fact that after he resigned his ministry he was recorded as "remarkably blest in private estate," shows some slight foundation for the suggestion, and gives solid ground for Dudley's special interest in him.