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Title: Anne Bradstreet and Her Time

Author: Helen Campbell

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ANNE BRADSTREET AND HER TIME

BY

HELEN CAMPBELL

AUTHOR OF "PRISONERS OF POVERTY," "MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME," "MISS
MELINDA'S OPPORTUNITY," ETC.




A BOOK FOR "MISS ICY."




INTRODUCTION.


Grave doubts at times arise in the critical mind as to whether
America has had any famous women. We are reproached with the fact,
that in spite of some two hundred years of existence, we have, as
yet, developed no genius in any degree comparable to that of
George Eliot and George Sand in the present, or a dozen other as
familiar names of the past. One at least of our prominent literary
journals has formulated this reproach, and is even sceptical as to
the probability of any future of this nature for American women.

What the conditions have been which hindered and hampered such
development, will find full place in the story of the one woman
who, in the midst of obstacles that might easily have daunted a
far stouter soul, spoke such words as her limitations allowed.
Anne Bradstreet, as a name standing alone, and represented only by
a volume of moral reflections and the often stilted and unnatural
verse of the period, would perhaps, hardly claim a place in formal
biography. But Anne Bradstreet, the first woman whose work has
come down to us from that troublous Colonial time, and who, if not
the mother, is at least the grandmother of American literature, in
that her direct descendants number some of our most distinguished
men of letters calls for some memorial more honorable than a page
in an Encyclopedia, or even an octavo edition of her works for the
benefit of stray antiquaries here and there. The direct ancestress
of the Danas, of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips, the
Channings, the Buckminsters and other lesser names, would
naturally inspire some interest if only in an inquiry as to just
what inheritance she handed down, and the story of what she failed
to do because of the time into which she was born, holds equal
meaning with that of what she did do.

I am indebted to Mr. John Harvard Ellis's sumptuous edition of
Anne Bradstreet's works, published in 1867, and containing all her
extant works, for all extracts of either prose or verse, as well
as for many of the facts incorporated in Mr. Ellis's careful
introduction. Miss Bailey's "History of Andover," has proved a
valuable aid, but not more so than "The History of New England,"
by Dr. John Gorham Palfrey, which affords in many points, the most
careful and faithful picture on record of the time, personal
facts, unfortunately, being of the most meager nature. They have
been sought for chiefly, however, in the old records themselves;
musty with age and appallingly diffuse as well as numerous, but
the only source from which the true flavor of a forgotten time can
be extracted. Barren of personal detail as they too often are, the
writer of the present imperfect sketch has found Anne Bradstreet,
in spite of all such deficiencies, a very real and vital person,
and ends her task with the belief which it is hoped that the
reader may share, that among the honorable women not a few whose
lives are to-day our dearest possession, not one claims tenderer
memory than she who died in New England two hundred years ago.

NEW YORK, 1890.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I. THE OLD HOME

CHAPTER II. UPHEAVALS

CHAPTER III. THE VOYAGE

CHAPTER IV. BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER V. OLD FRIENDS AND NEW

CHAPTER VI. A THEOLOGICAL TRAGEDY

CHAPTER VII. COLONIAL LITERARY DEVELOPMENT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER VIII. SOME PHASES OF EARLY COLONIAL LIFE

CHAPTER IX. ANDOVER

CHAPTER X. VILLAGE LIFE IN 1650

CHAPTER XI A FIRST EDITION

CHAPTER XII. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

CHAPTER XIII. CHANCES AND CHANGES

CHAPTER XIV. A LEGACY

CHAPTER XV. THE PURITAN REIGN OF TERROR

CHAPTER XVI. HOME AND ABROAD

CHAPTER XVII. THE END




ANNE BRADSTREET AND HER TIME.




CHAPTER I.

THE OLD HOME.


The birthday of the baby, Anne Dudley, has no record; her
birthplace even is not absolutely certain, although there is
little doubt that it was at Northhampton in England, the home of
her father's family. She opened her eyes upon a time so filled
with crowding and conflicting interests that there need be no
wonder that the individual was more or less ignored, and personal
history lost in the general. To what branch of the Dudley family
she belonged is also uncertain. Moore, in his "Lives of the
Governors of New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay," writes: "There
is a tradition among the descendants of Governor Dudley in the
eldest branch of the family, that he was descended from John
Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who was beheaded 22 February,
1553." Such belief was held for a time, but was afterward
disallowed by Anne Bradstreet. In her "Elegy upon Sir Philip
Sidney," whose mother, the Lady Mary, was the eldest daughter of
that Duke of Northumberland, she wrote:

  "Let, then, none disallow of these my straines,
  Which have the self-same blood yet in my veines."

With the second edition of her poems, however, her faith had
changed. This may have been due to a growing indifference to
worldly distinctions, or, perhaps, to some knowledge of the
dispute as to the ancestry of Robert Dudley, son of the Duke, who
was described by one side as a nobleman, by another as a
carpenter, and by a third as "a noble timber merchant"; while a
wicked wit wrote that "he was the son of a duke, the brother of a
king, the grandson of an esquire, and the great-grandson of a
carpenter; that the carpenter was the only honest man in the
family and the only one who died in his bed." Whatever the cause
may have been she renounced all claim to relationship, and the
lines were made to read as they at present stand:

  "Then let none disallow of these my straines
  Whilst English blood yet runs within my veines."

In any case, her father, Thomas Dudley, was of gentle blood and
training, being the only son of Captain Roger Dudley, who was
killed in battle about the year 1577, when the child was hardly
nine years old. Of his mother there is little record, as also of
the sister from whom he was soon separated, though we know that
Mrs. Dudley died shortly after her husband. Her maiden name is
unknown; she was a relative of Sir Augustine Nicolls, of Paxton,
Kent, one of His Majesty's Justices of his Court of Common Pleas,
and keeper of the Great Seal to Prince Charles.

The special friend who took charge of Thomas Dudley through
childhood is said to have been "a Miss Purefoy," and if so, she
was the sister of Judge Nicolls, who married a Leicestershire
squire, named William Purefoy. Five hundred pounds was left in
trust for him, and delivered to him when he came of age; a sum
equivalent to almost as many thousand to-day. At the school to
which he was sent he gained a fair knowledge of Latin, but he was
soon taken from it to become a page in the family of William Lord
Compton, afterward the Earl of Northumberland.

His studies were continued, and in time he became a clerk of his
kinsman, "Judge Nicholls," whose name appears in letters, and who
was a sergeant-at-law. Such legal knowledge as came to him here
was of service through all his later life, but law gave place to
arms, the natural bias of most Englishmen at that date, and he
became captain of eighty volunteers "raised in and about
Northhampton, and forming part of the force collected by order of
Queen Elizabeth to assist Henry IV. of France, in the war against
Philip II. of Spain," He was at the siege of Amiens in 1597, and
returned home when it ended, having, though barely of age, already
gained distinction as a soldier, and acquired the courtesy of
manner which distinguished him till later life, and the blandness
of which often blinded unfamiliar acquaintances to the penetration
and acumen, the honesty and courage that were the foundations of
his character. As his belief changed, and the necessity for free
speech was laid upon him, he ceased to disguise his real feelings
and became even too out-spoken, the tendency strengthening year by
year, and doing much to diminish his popularity, though his
qualities were too sterling to allow any lessening of real honor
and respect. But he was still the courtier, and untitled as he
was, prestige enough came with him to make his marriage to "a
gentlewoman whose Extract and Estate were Considerable," a very
easy matter, and though we know her only as Dorothy Dudley, no
record of her maiden name having been preserved, the love borne
her by both husband and daughter is sufficient evidence of her
character and influence.

Puritanism was not yet an established fact, but the seed had been
sown which later became a tree so mighty that thousands gathered
under its shadow. The reign of Elizabeth had brought not only power
but peace to England, and national unity had no further peril of
existence to dread. With peace, trade established itself on sure
foundations and increased with every year. Wealth flowed into the
country and the great merchants of London whose growth amazed and
troubled the royal Council, founded hospitals, "brought the New
River from its springs at Chadwell and Amwell to supply the city
with pure water," and in many ways gave of their increase for the
benefit of all who found it less easy to earn. The smaller
land-owners came into a social power never owned before, and
"boasted as long a rent-roll and wielded as great an influence as
many of the older nobles.... In wealth as in political consequence
the merchants and country gentlemen who formed the bulk of the House
of Commons, stood far above the mass of the peers."

Character had changed no less than outward circumstances. "The
nation which gave itself to the rule of the Stewarts was another
nation from the panic-struck people that gave itself in the crash
of social and religious order to the guidance of the Tudors."
English aims had passed beyond the bounds of England, and every
English "squire who crossed the Channel to flesh his maiden sword
at Ivry or Ostend, brought back to English soil, the daring
temper, the sense of inexhaustable resources, which had bourn him
on through storm and battle field." Such forces were not likely to
settle into a passive existence at home. Action had become a
necessity. Thoughts had been stirred and awakened once for all.
Consciously for the few, unconsciously for the many, "for a
hundred years past, men had been living in the midst of a
spiritual revolution. Not only the world about them, but the world
within every breast had been utterly transformed. The work of the
sixteenth century had wrecked that tradition of religion, of
knowledge, of political and social order, which had been accepted
without question by the Middle Ages. The sudden freedom of the
mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of power such
as had never been felt before; and the restless energy, the
universal activity of the Renaissance were but outer expressions
of the pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man
welcomed this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering
within him."

This was the first stage, but another quickly and naturally
followed, and dread took the place of confidence. With the
deepening sense of human individuality, came a deepening
conviction of the boundless capacities of the human soul. Not as a
theological dogma, but as a human fact man knew himself to be an
all but infinite power, whether for good or for ill. The drama
towered into sublimity as it painted the strife of mighty forces
within the breasts of Othello or Macbeth. Poets passed into
metaphysicians as they strove to unravel the workings of
conscience within the soul. From that hour one dominant influence
told on human action; and all the various energies that had been
called into life by the age that was passing away were seized,
concentrated and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of
religion. Among the myriads upon whom this change had come, Thomas
Dudley was naturally numbered, and the ardent preaching of the
well-known Puritan ministers, Dodd and Hildersham, soon made him a
Non-conformist and later an even more vigorous dissenter from
ancient and established forms. As thinking England was of much the
same mind, his new belief did not for a time interfere with his
advancement, for, some years after his marriage he became steward
of the estate of the Earl of Lincoln, and continued so for more
than ten years. Plunged in debt as the estate had been by the
excesses of Thomas, Earl of Lincoln, who left the property to his
son Theophilus, so encumbered that it was well nigh worthless, a
few years of Dudley's skillful management freed it entirely, and
he became the dear and trusted friend of the entire family. His
first child had been born in 1610, a son named Samuel, and in 1612
came the daughter whose delicate infancy and childhood gave small
hint of the endurance shown in later years. Of much the same
station and training as Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Dudley could
undoubtedly have written in the same words as that most delightful
of chroniclers: "By the time I was four years old I read English
perfectly, and having a great memory I was carried to sermons....
When I was about seven years of age, I remember I had at one time
eight tutors in several qualities, languages, music, dancing,
writing and needle work; but my genius was quite averse from all
but my book, and that I was so eager of, that my mother thinking
it prejudiced my health, would moderate me in it; yet this rather
animated me than kept me back, and every moment I could steal from
my play I would employ in any book I could find when my own were
locked up from me."

It is certain that the little Anne studied the Scriptures at six
or seven, with as painful solicitude as her elders, for she writes
in the fragmentary diary which gives almost the only clue to her
real life:

"In my young years, about 6 or 7, as I take it, I began to make
conscience of my wayes, and what I knew was sinful, as lying,
disobedience to Parents, etc., I avoided it. If at any time I was
overtaken with the like evills, it was a great Trouble. I could
not be at rest 'till by prayer I had confest it unto God. I was
also troubled at the neglect of Private Duteys, tho' too often
tardy that way. I also found much comfort in reading the
Scriptures, especially those places I thought most concerned my
Condition, and as I grew to have more understanding, so the more
solace I took in them.

"In a long fitt of sickness which I had on my bed, I often
communed with my heart and made my supplication to the most High,
who sett me free from that affliction."

For a childhood which at six searches the Scriptures to find
verses applicable to its condition, there cannot have been much if
any natural child life, and Mrs. Hutchinson's experience again was
probably duplicated for the delicate and serious little Anne.
"Play among other children I despised, and when I was forced to
entertain such as came to visit me, I tried them with more grave
instruction than their mothers, and plucked all their babies to
pieces, and kept the children in such awe, that they were glad
when I entertained myself with elder company, to whom I was very
acceptable, and living in the house with many persons that had a
great deal of wit, and very profitable serious discourses being
frequent at my father's table and in my mother's drawing room, I
was very attentive to all, and gathered up things that I would
utter again, to great admiration of many that took my memory and
imitation for wit.... I used to exhort my mother's words much, and
to turn their idle discourses to good subjects."

Given to exhortation as some of the time may have been, and drab-
colored as most of the days certainly were, there were, bright
passages here and there, and one reminiscence was related in later
years, in her poem "In Honour of Du Bartas," the delight of
Puritan maids and mothers;

  "My muse unto a Child I may compare,
  Who sees the riches of some famous Fair,
  He feeds his eyes but understanding lacks,
  To comprehend the worth of all those knacks;
  The glittering plate and Jewels he admires,
  The Hats and Fans, the Plumes and Ladies' tires,
  And thousand times his mazed mind doth wish
  Some part, at least, of that brave wealth was his;
  But seeing empty wishes nought obtain,
  At night turns to his Mother's cot again,
  And tells her tales (his full heart over glad),
  Of all the glorious sights his eyes have had;
  But finds too soon his want of Eloquence,
  The silly prattler speaks no word of sense;
  But seeing utterance fail his great desires,
  Sits down in silence, deeply he admires."

It is probably to one of the much exhorted maids that she owed
this glimpse of what was then a rallying ground for the jesters
and merry Andrews, and possibly even a troop of strolling players,
frowned upon by the Puritan as children of Satan, but still
secretly enjoyed by the lighter minded among them. But the burden
of the time pressed more and more heavily. Freedom which had
seemed for a time to have taken firm root, and to promise a better
future for English thought and life, lessened day by day under the
pressure of the Stuart dynasty, and every Nonconformist home was
the center of anxieties that influenced every member of it from
the baby to the grandsire, whose memory covered more astonishing
changes than any later day has known.

The year preceding Anne Dudley's birth, had seen the beginning of
the most powerful influence ever produced upon a people, made
ready for it, by long distrust of such teaching as had been
allowed. With the translation of the Bible into common speech, and
the setting up of the first six copies in St. Pauls, its
popularity had grown from day to day. The small Geneva Bibles soon
appeared and their substance had become part of the life of every
English family within an incredibly short space of time. Not only
thought and action but speech itself were colored and shaped by
the new influence. We who hold to it as a well of English
undefiled, and resent even the improvements of the new Version as
an infringement on a precious possession, have small conception of
what it meant to a century which had had no prose literature and
no poetry save the almost unknown verse of Chaucer.

"Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered
round the Bible in the nave of St. Pauls, or the family group that
hung on its words in the devotional exercises at home, were
leavened with a new literature. Legend and annal, war song and
psalm, State-roll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets,
the parables of Evangelists, stories of mission-journeys, of
perils by the sea and among the heathens, philosophic arguments,
apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast over minds
unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The disclosure
of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution of
Renaissance. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew
literature, wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one
revolution was far deeper and wider in its effects than the other.
No version could transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of
language which gave their value to the authors of Greece and Rome.
Classical letters, therefore, remained in the possession of the
learned, that is, of the few, and among these, with the exception
of Colet and More, or of the pedants who revived a Pagan worship
in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct influence
was purely intellectual. But the language of the Hebrew, the idiom
of the Hellenistic Greek, lent themselves with a curious felicity
to the purposes of translation. As a mere literary monument the
English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the
English tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant
of its appearance, the standard of our language.

"One must dwell upon this fact persistently, before it will become
possible to understand aright either the people or the literature of
the time. With generations the influence has weakened, though the
best in English speech has its source in one fountain. But the
Englishman of that day wove his Bible into daily speech, as we weave
Shakespeare or Milton or our favorite author of a later day. It was
neither affectation nor hypocrisy but an instinctive use that made
the curious mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which colored
English talk two hundred years ago. The mass of picturesque allusion
and illustration which we borrow from a thousand books, our fathers
were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing was the easier and
the more natural, that the range of the Hebrew literature fitted it
for the expression of every phase of feeling. When Spencer poured
forth his warmest love-notes in the 'Epithalamion,' he adopted the
very words of the Psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the
entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the
hills of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David: 'Let
God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke
vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' Even to common minds this
familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse,
gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its tendency
to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod
vulgarisms of today."

Children caught the influence, and even baby talk was half
scriptural, so that there need be no surprise in finding Anne
Bradstreet's earliest recollections couched in the phrases of
psalms learned by heart as soon as she could speak, and used, no
doubt, half unconsciously. Translate her sentences into the
thought of to-day, and it is evident, that aside from the morbid
conscientiousness produced by her training, that she was the
victim of moods arising from constant ill-health. Her constitution
seems to have been fragile in the extreme, and there is no
question but that in her case as in that of many another child
born into the perplexed and troubled time, the constant anxiety of
both parents, uncertain what a day might bring forth, impressed
itself on the baby soul. There was English fortitude and courage,
the endurance born of faith, and the higher evolution from English
obstinacy, but there was for all of them, deep self-distrust and
abasement; a sense of worthlessness that intensified with each
generation; and a perpetual, unhealthy questioning of every
thought and motive. The progress was slow but certain, rising
first among the more sensitive natures of women, whose lives held
too little action to drive away the mists, and whose motto was
always, "look in and not out"--an utter reversal of the teaching
of to-day. The children of that generation lost something that had
been the portion of their fathers. The Elizabethan age had been
one of immense animal life and vigor, and of intense capacity for
enjoyment, and, deny it as one might, the effect lingered and had
gone far toward forming character. The early Nonconformist still
shared in many worldly pleasures, and had found no occasion to
condense thought upon points in Calvinism, or to think of himself
as a refugee from home and country.

The cloud at first no bigger than a man's hand, was not dreaded,
and life in Nonconformist homes went on with as much real
enjoyment as if their ownership were never to be questioned.
Serious and sad, as certain phases come to be, it is certain that
home life developed as suddenly as general intelligence. The
changes in belief in turn affected character. "There was a sudden
loss of the passion, the caprice, the subtle and tender play of
feeling, the breath of sympathy, the quick pulse of delight, which
had marked the age of Elizabeth; but on the other hand life gained
in moral grandeur, in a sense of the dignity of manhood, in
orderliness and equable force. The larger geniality of the age
that had passed away was replaced by an intense tenderness within
the narrower circle of the home. Home, as we now conceive it, was
the creation of the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere
dependants on the will of husband or father, as husband or father
saw in them saints like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a
divine spirit and called with a divine calling like his own. The
sense of spiritual fellowship gave a new tenderness and refinement
to the common family affections."

The same influence had touched Thomas Dudley, and Dorothy Dudley
could have written of him as Lucy Hutchinson did of her husband:
"He was as kind a father, as dear a brother, as good a master, as
faithful a friend as the world had." In a time when, for the
Cavalier element, license still ruled and lawless passion was
glorified by every play writer, the Puritan demanded a different
standard, and lived a life of manly purity in strange contrast to
the grossness of the time. Of Hutchinson and Dudley and thousands
of their contemporaries the same record held good: "Neither in
youth nor riper years could the most fair or enticing woman draw
him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise and virtuous
women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and unblameable
conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or
temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and
though he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that
which was mixed with impurity he never could endure."

Naturally with such standards life grew orderly and methodical.
"Plain living and high thinking," took the place of high living
and next to no thinking. Heavy drinking was renounced. Sobriety
and self-restraint ruled here as in every other act of life, and
the division between Cavalier and Nonconformist became daily more
and more marked. Persecution had not yet made the gloom and
hardness which soon came to be inseparable from the word Puritan,
and children were still allowed many enjoyments afterward totally
renounced. Milton could write, even after his faith had settled
and matured:

  "Haste then, nymph, and bring with thee
  Jest and youthful jollity,
  Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles,
  Nods and becks and wreathed Smiles,
  Such as hang on Hebe's cheek
  And love to live in dimple sleek;
  Sports that wrinkled care derides
  And Laughter holding both his sides."

Cromwell himself looked on at masques and revels, and Whitelock, a
Puritan lawyer and his ambassador to Sweden, left behind him a
reputation for stately and magnificent entertaining, which his
admirers could never harmonize with his persistent refusal to
conform to the custom of drinking healths. In the report of this
embassy printed after Whitelock's return and republished some
years ago, occurs one of the best illustrations of Puritan social
life at that period. "How could you pass over their very long
winter nights?" was one of the questions asked by the Protector at
the first audience after his return from The embassy.

"I kept my people together," was the reply, "and in action and
recreation, by having music in my house, and encouraging that and
the exercise of dancing, which held them by the eyes and ears, and
gave them diversion without any offence. And I caused the
gentlemen to have disputations in Latin, and declamations upon
words which I gave them." Cromwell, "Those were very good
diversions, and made your house a little academy."

Whitelock, "I thought these recreations better than gaming for
money, or going forth to places of debauchery."

Cromwell, "It was much better."

In the Earl of Lincoln's household such amusements would be
common, and it was not till many years later, that a narrowing
faith made Anne write them down as "the follyes of youth." Through
that youth, she had part in every opportunity that the increased
respect for women afforded.

Many a Puritan matron shared her husband's studies, or followed
her boys in their preparation for Oxford or Cambridge, and Anne
Bradstreet's poems and the few prose memorials she left, give full
evidence of an unusually broad training, her delicacy of health
making her more ready for absorption in study. Shakespeare and
Cervantes were still alive at her birth, and she was old enough,
with the precocious development of the time, to have known the
sense of loss and the general mourning at their death in 1616. It
is doubtful if the plays of the elder dramatists were allowed her,
though there are hints in her poems of some knowledge of
Shakespeare, but by the time girlhood was reached, the feeling
against them had increased to a degree hardly comprehensible save
in the light of contemporaneous history. The worst spirit of the
time was incorporated in the later plays, and the Puritans made no
discrimination. The players in turn hated them, and Mrs.
Hutchinson wrote: "Every stage and every table, and every puppet-
play, belched forth profane scoffs upon them, the drunkards made
them their songs, and all fiddlers and mimics learned to abuse
them, as finding it the most gameful way of fooling."

If, however, the dramatists were forbidden, there were new and
inexhaustible sources of inspiration and enjoyment, in the throng
of new books, which the quiet of the reign of James allowed to
appear in quick succession. Chapman's magnificent version of Homer
was delighting Cavalier and Puritan alike. "Plutarch's Lives,"
were translated by Sir Thomas North and his book was "a household
book for the whole of the seventeenth century." Montaigne's Essays
had been "done into English" by John Florio, and to some of them
at least Thomas Dudley was not likely to take exception. Poets and
players had, however, come to be classed together and with some
reason, both alike antagonizing the Puritan, but the poets of the
reign of James were far more simple and natural in style than
those of the age of Elizabeth, and thus, more likely to be read in
Puritan families. Their numbers may be gauged by their present
classification into "pastoral, satirical, theological, metaphysical
and humorous," but only two of them were in entire sympathy
with the Puritan spirit, or could be read without serious shock
to belief and scruples.

For the sake of her own future work, deeper drinking at these
springs was essential, and in rejecting them, Anne Dudley lost the
influence that must have moulded her own verse into much more
agreeable form for the reader of to-day, though it would probably
have weakened her power in her own day. The poets she knew best
hindered rather than helped development. Wither and Quarles, both
deeply Calvinistic, the former becoming afterward one of
Cromwell's major-generals, were popular not only then but long
afterward, and Quarles' "Emblems", which appeared in 1635, found
their way to New England and helped to make sad thought still more
dreary. Historians and antiquaries were at work. Sir Walter
Raleigh's "History of the World," must have given little Anne her
first suggestion of life outside of England, while Buchanan, the
tutor of King James, had made himself the historian and poet of
Scotland. Bacon had just ended life and labor; Hooker's
Ecclesiastical Polity was before the world, though not completed
until 1632, and the dissensions of the time had given birth to a
"mass of sermons, books of devotion, religious tracts and
controversial pamphlets." Sermons abounded, those of Archbishop
Usher, Andrews and Donne being specially valued, while "The
Saint's Cordial," of Dr. Richard Sibbs, and the pious meditations
of Bishop Hall were on every Puritan bookshelf. But few strictly
sectarian books appeared, "the censorship of the press, the right
of licensing books being almost entirely arrogated to himself by
the untiring enemy of the Nonconformists, Laud, Bishop of London,
whose watchful eye few heretical writings could escape.. . . Many
of the most ultra pamphlets and tracts were the prints of foreign
presses secretly introduced into the country without the form of a
legal entry at Stationers' Hall."

The same activity which filled the religious world, was found also
in scientific directions and Dr. Harvey's discovery of the
circulation of the blood, and Napier's introduction of logarithms,
made a new era for both medicine and mathematics.

That every pulse of this new tide was felt in the castle at
Lempingham is very evident, in all Anne Bradstreet's work. The
busy steward found time for study and his daughter shared it, and
when he revolted against the incessant round of cares and for a
time resigned the position, the leisure gained was devoted to the
same ends. The family removed to Boston in Lincolnshire, and there
an acquaintance was formed which had permanent influence on the
minds of all.

Here dwelt the Rev. John Cotton, vicar of the parish and already
obnoxious to the Bishops.

No man among the Nonconformists had had more brilliant reputation
before the necessity of differing came upon him, and his personal
influence was something phenomenal. To the girl whose sensitive,
eager mind reached out to every thing high and noble he must have
seemed of even rarer stuff than to-day we know him to have been.

At thirteen he had entered Emmanuel College at Cambridge, and
adding distinction to distinction had come at last to be dean of
the college to which he belonged. His knowledge of Greek was
minute and thorough, and he conversed with ease in either Latin or
Hebrew. As a pulpit orator he was famous, and crowds thronged the
ancient church of St. Mary in Cambridge whenever he preached. Here
he gave them "the sort of sermons then in fashion--learned,
ornate, pompous, bristling with epigrams, stuffed with conceits,
all set off dramatically by posture, gesture and voice."

The year in which Anne Dudley was born, had completed the change
which had been slowly working in him and which Tyler describes in
his vivid pages on the theological writers of New England:

"His religious character had been deepening into Puritanism. He
had come to view his own preaching as frivolous, Sadducean,
pagan." He decided to preach one sermon which would show what
changes had come, and the announcement of his intention brought
together the usual throng of under-graduates, fellows and
professors who looked for the usual entertainment. Never was a
crowd more deceived. "In preparing once more to preach to this
congregation of worldly and witty folk, he had resolved to give
them a sermon intended to exhibit Jesus Christ rather than John
Cotton. This he did. His hearers were astonished, disgusted. Not a
murmur of applause greeted the several stages of his discourse as
before. They pulled their shovel caps down over their faces,
folded their arms, and sat it out sullenly, amazed that the
promising John Cotton had turned lunatic or Puritan."

Nearly twenty years passed before his energies were transferred to
New England, but the ending of his university career by no means
hampered his work elsewhere. As vicar of St. Botolphs at Boston
his influence deepened with every year, and he grew steadily in
knowledge about the Bible, and in the science of God and man as
seen through the dim goggles of John Calvin.

His power as a preacher was something tremendous, but he remained
undisturbed until the reign of James had ended and the "fatal eye
of Bishop Laud" fell upon him. "It was in 1633 that Laud became
primate of England; which meant, among other things, that nowhere
within the rim of that imperial island was there to be peace or
safety any longer for John Cotton. Some of his friends in high
station tried to use persuasive words with the archbishop on his
behalf, but the archbishop brushed aside their words with an
insupportable scorn. The Earl of Dorset sent a message to Cotton,
that if he had only been guilty of drunkenness or adultery, or any
such minor ministerial offence, his pardon could have been had;
but since his crime was Puritanism, he must flee for his life. So,
for his life he fled, dodging his pursuers; and finally slipping
out of England, after innumerable perils, like a hunted felon;
landing in Boston in September, 1633."

Long before this crisis had come, Thomas Dudley had been recalled
by the Earl of Lincoln, who found it impossible to dispense with
his services, and the busy life began again. Whether Anne missed
the constant excitement the strenuous spiritual life enforced on
all who made part of John Cotton's congregation, there is no
record, but one may infer from a passage in her diary that a
reaction had set in, and that youth asserted itself.

"But as I grew up to bee about fourteen or fifteen I found my
heart more carnall and sitting loose from God, vanity and the
follys of youth take hold of me.

"About sixteen, the Lord layd his hand sore upon me and smott mee
with the small-pox. When I was in my affliction, I besought the
Lord, and confessed my Pride and Vanity and he was entreated of
me, and again restored me. But I rendered not to him according to
ye benefit received."

Here is the only hint as to personal appearance. "Pride and
Vanity," are more or less associated with a fair countenance, and
though no record gives slightest detail as to form or feature,
there is every reason to suppose that the event, very near at
hand, which altered every prospect in life, was influenced in
degree, at least, by considerations slighted in later years, but
having full weight with both. That Thomas Dudley was a "very
personable man," we know, and there are hints that his daughter
resembled him, though it was against the spirit of the time to
record mere accidents of coloring or shape. But Anne's future
husband was a strikingly handsome man, not likely to ignore such
advantages in the wife he chose, and we may think of her as
slender and dark, with heavy hair and the clear, thoughtful eyes,
which may be seen in the potrait of Paul Dudley to-day. There were
few of what we consider the typical Englishmen among these Puritan
soldiers and gentry. Then, as now, the reformer and liberal was
not likely to be of the warm, headlong Saxon type, fair-haired,
blue-eyed, and open to every suggestion of pleasure loving
temperament. It was the dark-haired men of the few districts who
made up Cromwell's regiment of Ironsides, and who from what Galton
calls, "their atrabilious and sour temperament," were likely to
become extremists, and such Puritan portraits as remain to us,
have most of them these characteristics. The English type of face
altered steadily for many generations, and the Englishmen of the
eighteenth century had little kinship with the race reproduced in
Holbein's portraits, which show usually, "high cheek-bones, long
upper lips, thin eyebrows, and lank, dark hair. It would be
impossible ... for the majority of modern Englishmen so to dress
themselves and clip and arrange their hair, as to look like the
majority of these portraits."

The type was perpetuated in New England, where for a hundred
years, there was not the slightest admixture of foreign blood,
increased delicacy with each generation setting it farther and
farther apart from the always grosser and coarser type in Old
England. Puritan abstinence had much to do with this, though even
for them, heavy feeding, as compared with any modern standard was
the rule, its results being found in the diaries of what they
recorded and believed to be spiritual conflicts. Then, as now,
dyspepsia often posed as a delicately susceptible temperament, and
the "pasty" of venison or game, fulfilled the same office as the
pie into which it degenerated, and which is one of the most firmly
established of American institutions. Then, as occasionally even
to day, indigestion counted as "a hiding of the Lord's face," and
a bilious attack as "the hand of the Lord laid heavily on one for
reproof and correction." Such "reproof and correction" would often
follow if the breakfasts of the Earl of Lincoln and his household
were of the same order as those of the Earl of Northumberland, in
whose house "the family rose at six and took breakfast at seven.
My Lord and Lady sat down to a repast of two pieces of salted
fish, and half a dozen of red herrings, with four fresh ones, or a
dish of sprats and a quart of beer and the same measure of wine ...
At other seasons, half a chine of mutton or of boiled beef, graced
the board. Capons at two-pence apiece and plovers (at Christmas),
were deemed too good for any digestion that was not carried on in
a noble stomach."

With the dropping of fasts and meager days, fish was seldom used,
and the Sunday morning breakfast of Queen Elizabeth and her
retinue in one of her "progresses" through the country, for which
three oxen and one hundred and forty geese were furnished, became
the standard, which did not alter for many generations. A diet
more utterly unsuited to the child who passed from one fit of
illness to another, could hardly be imagined, and the gloom
discoverable in portions of her work was as certainly dyspepsia as
she imagined it to be "the motion and power of ye Adversary."
Winthrop had encountered the same difficulty and with his usual
insight and common sense, wrote in his private dairy fifteen years
before he left England, "Sep: 8, 1612. ffinding that the variety
of meates drawes me on to eate more than standeth with my healthe
I have resolved not to eat of more than two dishes at any one
meale, whither fish, fleshe, fowle or fruite or whitt-meats, etc;
whither at home or abroade; the lord give me care and abilitie to
perform it." Evidently the flesh rebelled, for later he writes:
"Idlenesse and gluttonie are the two maine pillars of the flesh
his kingdome," but he conquered finally, both he and Simon
Bradstreet being singularly abstinent.

Her first sixteen years of life were, for Anne Dudley, filled with
the intensest mental and spiritual activity--hampered and always
in leading strings, but even so, an incredible advance on anything
that had been the portion of women for generations. Then came, for
the young girl, a change not wholly unexpected, yet destined to
alter every plan, and uproot every early association. But to the
memories of that loved early life she held with an English
tenacity, not altered by transplanting, that is seen to-day in
countless New Englanders, whose English blood is of as pure a
strain as any to be found in the old home across the sea.




CHAPTER II.

UPHEAVALS.


Though the long engagement which Mr. Ruskin demands as a necessity
in lessening some of the present complications of the marriage
question may not have been the fortune of Simon and Anne
Bradstreet, it is certain that few couples have ever had better
opportunity for real knowledge of one another's peculiarities and
habits of thought. Circumstances placed them under the same roof
for years before marriage, and it would have been impossible to
preserve any illusions, while every weakness as well as every
virtue had fullest opportunity for disclosure. There is no hint of
other suitors, nor detail of the wooing, but the portrait of
Governor Bradstreet, still to be seen in the Senate Chamber of the
Massachusetts State House, shows a face that even in middle life,
the time at which the portrait was painted, held an ardor, that at
twenty-five must have made him irresistible. It is the head of
Cavalier rather than Roundhead--the full though delicately curved
lips and every line in the noble face showing an eager,
passionate, pleasure-loving temperament. But the broad, benignant
forehead, the clear, dark eyes, the firm, well-cut nose, hold
strength as well as sweetness, and prepare one for the reputation
which the old Colonial records give him. The high breeding, the
atmosphere of the whole figure, comes from a marvellously well-
balanced nature, as well as from birth and training. There is a
sense of the keenest life and vigor, both mental and physical, and
despite the Puritan garb, does not hide the man of whom his wife
might have written with Mrs. Hutchinson: "To sum up, therefore,
all that can be said of his outward frame and disposition, we must
truly conclude that it was a very handsome and well-furnished
lodging prepared for the reception of that prince who, in the
administration of all excellent virtues, reigned there a while,
till he was called back to the palace of the universal emperor."

Simon Bradstreet's father, "born of a wealthy family in Suffolk,
was one of the first fellows of Emanuel College, and highly
esteemed by persons distinguished for learning." In 1603 he was
minister at Horbling in Lincolnshire, but was never anything but a
nonconformist to the Church of England. Here in 1603 Simon
Bradstreet was born, and until fourteen years old was educated in
the grammar school of that place, till the death of his father
made some change necessary. John Cotton was the mutual friend of
both Dudley and the elder Bradstreet, and Dudley's interest in the
son may have arisen from this fact. However this may be, he was
taken at fifteen into the Earl of Lincoln's household, and trained
to the duties of a steward by Dudley himself. Anne being then a
child of nine years old, and probably looking up to him with the
devotion that was shared by her older brother, then eleven and
always the friend and ally of the future governor.

His capacity was so marked that Dr. Preston, another family friend
and a noted Nonconformist, interested himself in his further
education, and succeeded in entering him at Emanuel College,
Cambridge, in the position of governor to the young Lord Rich, son
of the Earl of Warwick. For some reason the young nobleman failed
to come to college and Bradstreet's time was devoted to a brother
of the Earl of Lincoln, who evidently shared the love of idleness
and dissipation that had marked his grandfather's career. It was
all pleasant and all eminently unprofitable, Bradstreet wrote in
later years, but he accomplished sufficient study to secure his
bachelor's degree in 1620. Four years later, while holding the
position of steward to the Earl of Lincoln, given him by Dudley on
the temporary removal to Boston, that of Master of Arts was
bestowed upon him, making it plain that his love of study had
continued. With the recall of Dudley, he became steward to the
countess of Warwick, which position he held at the time of his
marriage in 1628.

It was in this year that Anne, just before her marriage recorded,
when the affliction had passed: "About 16, the Lord layde his hand
sore upon me and smott me with the small-pox." It is curious that
the woman whose life in many points most resembles her own--Mrs.
Lucy Hutchinson--should have had precisely the same experience,
writing of herself in the "Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson": "That
day that the friends on both sides met to conclude the marriage,
she fell sick of the small-pox, which was in many ways a great
trial upon him. First, her life was in almost desperate hazard,
and then the disease, for the present, made her the most deformed
person that could be seen, for a great while after she recovered;
yet he was nothing troubled at it, but married her as soon as she
was able to quit the chamber, when the priest and all that saw her
were affrighted to look on her; but God recompensed his justice
and constancy by restoring her, though she was longer than
ordinary before she recovered to be as well as before."

Whether disease or treatment held the greater terror, it would be
hard to say. Modern medical science has devised many alleviations,
and often restores a patient without spot or blemish. But to have
lived at all in that day evidenced extraordinary vitality.
Cleanliness was unknown, water being looked upon as deadly poison
whether taken internally or applied externally. Covered with
blankets, every window tightly sealed, and the moaning cry for
water answered by a little hot ale or tincture of bitter herbs,
nature often gave up the useless struggle and released the
tortured and delirious wretch. The means of cure left the
constitution irretrievably weakened if not hopelessly ruined, and
the approach of the disease was looked upon with affright and
regarded usually as a special visitation of the wrath of God.

That Anne Dudley so viewed it is evident from the passage in her
diary, already quoted; that the Lord "smott" her, was unquestioned,
and she cast about in her girlish mind for the shadow of the
sin that had brought such judgment, making solemn resolutions,
not only against any further indulgence in "Pride and Vanity,"
but all other offences, deciding that self-abnegation was the
only course, and possibly even beginning her convalescence
with a feeling that love itself should be put aside, and all her
heart be "sett upon God." But Simon Bradstreet waited, like
Colonel Hutchinson, only till "she was fit to leave her chamber,"
and whether "affrighted" or not, the marriage was consummated
early in 1628.

Of heavier, stouter frame than Colonel Hutchinson, and of a far
more vigorous constitution, the two men had much in common. The
forces that moulded and influenced the one, were equally potent
with the other. The best that the time had to give entered into
both, and though Hutchinson's name and life are better known, it
is rather because of the beauty and power with which his story was
told, by a wife who worshipped him, than because of actually
greater desert. But the first rush of free thought ennobled many
men who in the old chains would have lived lives with nothing in
them worth noting, and names full of meaning are on every page of
the story of the time.

We have seen how the whole ideal of daily life had altered, as the
Puritan element gained ground, and the influence affected the
thought and life--even the speech of their opponents. A writer on
English literature remarks: "In one sense, the reign of James is
the most religious part of our history; for religion was then
fashionable. The forms of state, the king's speeches, the debates
in parliament and the current literature, were filled with
quotations from Scripture and quaint allusions to sacred things."

Even the soldier studied divinity, and Colonel Hutchinson, after
his "fourteen months various exercise of his mind, in the pursuit
of his love, being now at rest in the enjoyment of his wife,"
thought it the most natural thing in the world to make "an
entrance upon the study of school divinity, wherein his father was
the most eminent scholar of any gentleman in England and had a
most choice library.... Having therefore gotten into the house
with him an excellent scholar in that kind of learning, he for two
years made it the whole employment of his time."

Much of such learning Simon Bradstreet had taken in unconsciously
in the constant discussions about his father's table, as well as
in the university alive to every slightest change in doctrine,
where freer but fully as interested talk went on. Puritanism had
as yet acquired little of the bitterness and rigor born of
persecution, but meant simply emancipated thought, seeking
something better than it had known, but still claiming all the
good the world held for it. Milton is the ideal Puritan of the
time, and something of the influences that surrounded his youth
were in the home of every well-born Puritan. Even much farther
down in the social scale, a portrait remains of a London house
mother, which may stand as that of many, whose sons and daughters
passed over at last to the new world, hopeless of any quiet or
peace in the old. It is a turner in Eastcheap, Nehemiah
Wallington, who writes of his mother: "She was very loving and
obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her husband, very
tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were godly, much
misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of sobriety
unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church; when
others recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would
take her needle-work and say--'here is my recreation'.... God had
given her a very pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was
very ripe and perfect in all stories of the Bible, likewise in all
the stories of the Martyrs, and could readily turn to them; she
was also perfect and well seen in the English Chronicles, and in
the descents of the Kings of England. She lived in holy wedlock
with her husband twenty years, wanting but four days."

If the influence of the new thought was so potent with a class who
in the Tudor days had made up the London mob, and whose signature,
on the rare occasions when anybody wanted it, had been a mark, the
middle class, including professional men, felt it infinitely more.
In the early training with many, as with Milton's father, music
was a passion; there was nothing illiberal or narrow. In Milton's
case he writes: "My father destined me while yet a little boy to
the study of humane letters; which I seized with such eagerness
that from the twelth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my
lessons to my bed before midnight." "To the Greek, Latin and
Hebrew learned at school the scrivener advised him to add Italian
and French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spencer gave the
earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. In spite of the war
between playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in
Milton's days avow his love of the stage, 'if Jonson's learned
sock be on, or sweetest Shakspeare Fancy's child, warble his
native wood-notes wild' and gather from the 'masques and antique
pageantry,' of the court revels, hints for his own 'Comus' and
'Arcades'."

Simon Bradstreet's year at Cambridge probably held much the same
experience, and if a narrowing faith in time taught him to write
it down as "all unprofitable," there is no doubt that it helped to
broaden his nature and establish the Catholic-mindedness which in
later years, in spite of every influence against it, was one of
his distinguishing characteristics. In the meantime he was a
delightful companion. Cut off by his principles from much that
passed as enjoyment, hating the unbridled licentiousness, the
"ornate beastliness," of the Stuart reign, he like others of the
same faith took refuge in intellectual pleasures. Like Colonel
Hutchinson--and this portrait, contrary in all points to the
preconceived idea, is a typical one--he "could dance admirably
well, but neither in youth nor riper years made any practice of
it; he had skill in fencing such as became a gentleman; he had
great love to music and often diverted himself with a viol, on
which he played masterly; he had an exact ear and judgment in
other music; he shot excellently in bows and guns, and much used
them for his exercise; he had great judgment in paintings,
graving, sculpture, and all liberal arts, and had many curiosities
of value in all kinds; he took great delight in perspective
glasses, and, for his other rarities was not so much affected with
the antiquity as the merit of the work; he took much pleasure in
improvement of grounds, in planting groves and walks and fruit
trees, in opening springs, and making fish-ponds."

All these tastes were almost indispensable to anyone filling the
position which, alike, Dudley and Bradstreet held. "Steward" then,
had a very different meaning from any associated with it now, and
great estates were left practically in the hands of managers while
the owners busied themselves in other directions, relying upon the
good taste as well as the financial ability of the men who, as a
rule, proved more than faithful to the trust.

The first two years of marriage were passed in England, and held
the last genuine social life and intellectual development that
Anne Bradstreet was to enjoy. The love of learning was not lost in
the transition from one country to another, but it took on more
and more a theological bias, and embodied itself chiefly in
sermons and interminable doctrinal discussions. Even before the
marriage, Dudley had decided to join the New England colony, but
Simon Bradstreet hesitated and lingered, till forced to a decision
by the increasing shadow of persecution. Had they remained in
England, there is little doubt that Anne Bradstreet's mind,
sensitively alive as it was to every fine influence, would have
developed in a far different direction to that which it finally
took. The directness and joyous life of the Elizabethan literature
had given place to the euphuistic school, and as the Puritans put
aside one author after another as "not making for godliness," the
strained style, the quirks and conceits of men like Quarles and
Withers came to represent the highest type of literary effort. But
no author had the influence of Du Bartas, whose poems had been
translated by Joshua Sylvester in 1605, under the title of "Du
Bartas. His Duuine Weekes and Workes, with a Complete Collection
of all the other most delightfull Workes, Translated and Written
by ye famous Philomusus, Josvah Sylvester, Gent." He in turn was
an imitator; a French euphuist, whose work simply followed and
patterned after that of Ronsard, whose popularity for a time had
convinced France that no other poet had been before him, and that
no successor could approach his power. He chose to study classical
models rather than nature or life, and his most formidable poem,
merely a beginning of some five or six thousand verses on "the
race of French kings, descended from Francion, a child of Hector
and a Trojan by birth," ended prematurely on the death of Charles
IX, but served as a model for a generation of imitators.

What spell lay in the involved and interminable pages the modern
reader cannot decide, but Milton studied them, and affirmed that
they had aided in forming his style, and Spenser wrote of him--

  "And after thee, (du Bellay) 'gins
  Barras hie to raise
  His Heavenly muse, th' Almighty to adore.
  Live, happy spirits! th' honor of your name,
  And fill the world with never dying fame."

Dryden, too, shared the infatuation, and in the Epistle Dedicatory
to "The Spanish Friar," wrote: "I remember when I was a boy, I
thought inimitable Spenser a mean poet, in comparison of
Sylvester's 'Dubartas,' and was wrapt into an ecstasy when I read
these lines:

  "'Now when the winter's keener breath began
  To crystallize the Baltic ocean;
  To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods,
  And periwig with snow (wool) the bald-pate woods.'

"I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian." Van Lann
stigmatizes this poem, _Le Semaine ou Creation du Monde_, as "the
marriage-register of science and verse, written by a Gascon Moses,
who, to the minuteness of a Walt Whitman and the unction of a
parish-clerk, added an occasional dignity superior to anything
attained by the abortive epic of his master."

But he had some subtle, and to the nineteenth century mind,
inscrutable charm. Poets studied him and Anne Bradstreet did more
than study; she absorbed them, till such originality as had been
her portion perished under the weight. In later years she
disclaimed the charge of having copied from him, but the infection
was too thorough not to remain, and the assimilation had been so
perfect that imitation was unconscious. There was everything in the
life of Du Bartas to appeal to her imagination as well as her
sympathy, and with her minute knowledge of history she relished his
detail while reverencing his character. For Du Bartas was a French
Puritan, holding the same religious views as Henry IV, before he
became King of France, his strong religious nature appealing to
every English reader. Born in 1544, of noble parents, and brought
up, according to Michaud in the Biographic Universelle, to the
profession of arms, he distinguished himself as a soldier and
negotiater. Attached to the person of Prince Henry "in the capacity
of gentleman in ordinary of his bedchamber, he was successfully
employed by him on missions to Denmark, Scotland and England. He
was at the battle of Ivry and celebrated in song the victory which
he had helped to gain. He died four months after, in July, 1559, at
the age of forty-six, in consequence of some wounds which had been
badly healed. He passed all the leisure which his duties left him,
at his chateau du Bartas. It was there that he composed his long
and numerous poems.... His principal poem, _La Semaine,_ went
through more than thirty editions in less than six years, and was
translated into Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, German and
Dutch."

The influence was an unfortunate one. Nature had already been set
aside so thoroughly that, as with Dryden, Spenser was regarded as
common-place and even puerile, and the record of real life or
thought as no part of a poet's office. Such power of observation
as Anne Bradstreet had was discouraged in the beginning, and
though later it asserted itself in slight degree, her early work
shows no trace of originality, being, as we are soon to see,
merely a rhymed paraphrase of her reading. That she wrote verse,
not included in any edition of her poems, we know, the earliest
date assigned there being 1632, but the time she had dreaded was
at hand, and books and study went the way of many other pleasant
things.

With the dread must have mingled a certain thrill of hope and
expectation common to every thinking man and woman who in that
seventeenth century looked to the New World to redress every wrong
of the Old, and who watched every movement of the little band that
in Holland waited, for light on the doubtful and beclouded future.

The story of the first settlement needs no repetition here. The
years in Holland had knit the little band together more strongly
and lastingly than proved to be the case with any future company,
their minister, John Robinson, having infused his own intense and
self-abnegating nature into every one. That the Virginian colonies
had suffered incredibly they knew, but it had no power to dissuade
them. "We are well weaned," John Robinson wrote, "from the
delicate milk of the mother-country, and inured to the difficulties
of a strange land; the people are industrious and frugal. We
are knit together as a body in a most sacred covenant of the
Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and
by virtue whereof, we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care
of each other's good and of the whole. It is not with us, as with
men whom small things can discourage."

By 1629, the worst difficulties had been overcome, and the
struggle for mere existence had ended. The little colony, made up
chiefly of hard working men, had passed through every phase of
suffering. Sickness and famine had done their worst. The settlers
were thoroughly acclimated, and as they prospered, more and more
the eyes of Puritan England turned toward them, with a longing for
the same freedom. Laud's hand was heavy and growing heavier, and
as privileges lessened, and one after another found fine, or
pillory, or banishment awaiting every expression of thought, the
eagerness grew and intensified. As yet there had been no
separation from the Mother Church. It had simply "divided into two
great parties, the Prelatical or Hierarchical, headed by Laud, and
the Nonconformist or Puritan." For the latter, Calvin had become
the sole authority, and even as early as 1603, their preachers
made up more than a ninth of the clergy. The points of disagreement
increased steadily, each fresh severity from the Prelatical party
being met by determined resistance, and a stubborn resolution
never to yield an inch of the new convictions. No clearer
presentation of the case is to be found anywhere than in Mason's
life of Milton, the poet's life being absolutely contemporaneous
with the cause, and his own experience came to be that of hundreds.
From his childhood he had been set apart for the ministry,
but he was as he wrote in later life, with a bitterness he
never lost, "Church-outed by the prelates." "Coming to some
maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the
Church, that he who would take orders, must subscribe slave, and
take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that
would retch, he must either straight perjure or split his faith, I
thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred
office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and
forswearing."

Each year of the increasing complications found a larger body
enrolled on his side, and with 1629, Simon Bradstreet resigned any
hope of life in England, and cast in his fortunes once for all
with the projected colony. In dissolving his third Parliament
Charles had granted the charter for the Massachusetts Colony, and
seizing upon this as a "Providential call," the Puritans at once
circulated "conclusions" among gentry and traders, and full
descriptions of Massachusetts. Already many capitalists deemed
encouragement of the emigration an excellent speculation, but the
prospective emigrants had no mind to be ruled by a commercial
company at home, and at last, after many deliberations, the old
company was dissolved; the officers resigned and their places were
filled by persons who proposed to emigrate.

Two days before this change twelve gentlemen met at Cambridge and
"pledged themselves to each other to embark for New England with
their families for a permanent residence."

"Provided always, that, before the last of September next, the
whole government, together with the patent for the said
plantation, be first legally transferred." Dudley's name was one
of the twelve, and at another meeting in October he was also
present, with John Winthrop, who was shortly chosen governor. A
day or two later, Dudley was made assistant governor, and in the
early spring of 1630, but a few days before sailing Simon
Bradstreet was elected to the same office in the place of Mr.
Thomas Goffe. One place of trust after another was filled by the
two men, whose history henceforward is that of New England. Dudley
being very shortly made "undertaker," that is, to be one of those
having "the sole managinge of the joynt stock, wth all things
incydent theronto, for the space of 7 years."

Even for the sternest enthusiasts, the departure seemed a
banishment, though Winthrop spoke the mind of all when he wrote,
"I shall call that my country where I may most glorify God and
enjoy the presence of my dearest friends."

For him the dearest were left behind for a time, and in all
literature there is no tenderer letter than that in which his last
words go to the wife whom he loved with all the strength of his
nature, and the parting from whom, was the deepest proof that
could have been of his loyalty to the cause he had made his own.

As he wrote the Arbella was riding at anchor at Cowes, waiting for
favorable winds. Some of the party had gone on shore, and all
longed to end these last hours of waiting which simply prolonged a
pain that even the most determined and resolute among them, felt
to be almost intolerable. Many messages went back carried by
friends who lingered at Cowes for the last look at the vanishing
sails, but none better worth record than the words which hold the
man's deep and tender soul.

"And now, my sweet soul, I must once again take my last farewell
of thee in old England. It goeth very near to my heart to leave
thee, but I know to whom I have committed thee, even to Him, who
loves thee much better than any husband can; who hath taken
account of the hairs of thy head, and puts all thy tears in his
bottle; who can, and (if it be for his glory) will, bring us
together again with peace and comfort. Oh, how it refresheth my
heart to think, that I shall yet again see thy sweet face in the
land of the living; that lovely countenance that I have so much
delighted in, and beheld with so great content! I have hitherto
been so taken up with business, as I could seldom look back to my
former happiness; but now when I shall be at some leisure, I shall
not avoid the remembrance of thee, nor the grief for thy absence.
Thou hast thy share with me, but I hope the course we have agreed
upon will be some ease to us both. Mondays and Fridays at five
o'clock at night we shall meet in spirit till we meet in person.
Yet if all these hopes should fail, blessed be our God, that we
are assured we shall meet one day, if not as husband and wife, yet
in a better condition. Let that stay and comfort thine heart.
Neither can the sea drown thy husband, nor enemies destroy, nor
any adversity deprive thee of thy husband or children. Therefore I
will only take thee now and my sweet children in mine arms, and
kiss and embrace you all, and so leave you with God. Farewell,
farewell. I bless you all in the name of the Lord Jesus."

"Farewell, dear England!" burst from the little group on that 8th
of April, 1630, when at last, a favorable wind bore them out to
sea, and Anne Bradstreet's voice had part in that cry of pain and
longing, as the shores grew dim and "home faded from their sight.
But one comfort or healing remained for them, in the faith that
had been with all from the beginning, one record being for them
and the host who preceded and followed their flight. So they left
that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting
place; ... but they knew they were pilgrims and looked not much on
those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest
country, and quieted their spirits."




CHAPTER III.

THE VOYAGE.


It is perhaps the fault of the seventeenth century and its firm
belief that a woman's office was simply to wait such action as man
might choose to take, that no woman's record remains of the long
voyage or the first impressions of the new country.

For the most of them writing was by no means a familiar task, but
this could not be said of the women on board the Arbella, who had
known the highest cultivation that the time afforded. But poor
Anne Bradstreet's young "heart rose," to such a height that
utterance may have been quite stifled, and as her own family were
all with her, there was less need of any chronicle.

For all details, therefore, we are forced to depend on the journal
kept by Governor Winthrop, who busied himself not only with this,
making the first entry on that Easter Monday which found them
riding at anchor at Cowes, but with another quite as characteristic
piece of work. A crowded storm-tossed ship, is hardly a point to
which one looks for any sustained or fine literary composition,
but the little treatise, "A Model of Christian Charity," the fruit
of long and silent musing on the new life awaiting them, holds
the highest thought of the best among them, and was undoubtedly
read with the profoundest feeling and admiration, as it took shape
in the author's hands. There were indications even in the first
fervor of the embarkation, that even here some among them
thought "every man upon his own," while greater need of
unselfishness and self-renunciation had never been before
a people. "Only by mutual love and help," and "a grand, patient,
self-denial," was there the slightest hope of meeting the demands
bound up with the new conditions, and Winthrop wrote--"We must be
knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each
other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge
ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others'
necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together, in all
meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in
each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together,
mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before
our eyes, our commission and community in the work as members of
the same body."

A portion of this body were as closely united as if forming but
one family. The lady Arbella, in compliment to whom the ship,
which had been first known as The Eagle, had been re-christened,
had married Mr. Isaac Johnson, one of the wealthiest members of
the party. She was a sister of the Earl of Lincoln who had come to
the title in 1619, and whose family had a more intimate connection
with the New England settlements than that of any other English
nobleman. Her sister Susan had become the wife of John Humfrey,
another member of the company, and the close friendship between
them and the Dudleys made it practically a family party. Anne
Bradstreet had grown up with both sisters, and all occupied
themselves in such ways as their cramped quarters would allow.
Space was of the narrowest, and if the Governor and his deputies
indulged themselves in spreading out papers, there would be small
room for less important members of the expedition. But each had
the little Geneva Bible carried by every Puritan, and read it with
a concentrated eagerness born of the sense that they had just
escaped its entire loss, and there were perpetual religious
exercises of all varieties, with other more secular ones recorded
in the Journal. In the beginning there had been some expectation
that several other ships would form part of the expedition, but
they were still not in sailing order and thus the first entry
records "It was agreed, (it being uncertain when the rest of the
fleet would be ready) these four ships should consort together;
the Arbella to be Admiral, the Talbot Vice-Admiral, the Ambrose
Rear-Admiral, and the Jewel a Captain; and accordingly articles of
consortship were drawn between the said captains and masters."

The first week was one of small progress, for contrary winds drove
them back persistently and they at last cast anchor before
Yarmouth, and with the feeling that some Jonah might be in their
midst ordered a fast for Friday, the 2d of April, at which time
certain light-minded "landmen, pierced a runlet of strong water,
and stole some of it, for which we laid them in bolts all the
night, and the next morning the principal was openly whipped, and
both kept with bread and water that day."

Nothing further happened till Monday, when excitement was afforded
for the younger members of the party at least, as "A maid of Sir
Robert Saltonstall fell down at the grating by the cook-room, but
the carpenter's man, who unwittingly, occasioned her fall caught
hold of her with incredible nimbleness, and saved her; otherwise
she had fallen into the hold."

Tuesday, finding that the wind was still against them, the captain
drilled the landmen with their muskets, "and such as were good
shot among them were enrolled to serve in the ship if occasion
should be"; while the smell of powder and the desire, perhaps, for
one more hour on English soil, made the occasion for another item:
"The lady Arbella and the gentlewomen, and Mr. Johnson and some
others went on shore to refresh themselves."

The refreshment was needed even then. Anne Bradstreet was still
extremely delicate, never having fully recovered from the effects
of the small-pox, and the Lady Arbella's health must have been so
also, as it failed steadily through the voyage, giving the sorest
anxiety to her husband and every friend on board.

It is evident from an entry in Anne Bradstreet's diary after
reaching New England that even the excitement of change and the
hope common to all of a happy future, was not strong enough to
keep down the despondency which came in part undoubtedly from her
weak health. The diary is not her own thoughts or impressions of
the new life, but simply bits of religious experience; an
autobiography of the phase with which we could most easily
dispense. "After a short time I changed my condition and was
married, and came into this country, where I found a new world and
new manners at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it
was the will of God I submitted to it and joined to the church at
Boston."

This rebellion must have been from the beginning, for every inch
of English soil was dear to her, but she concealed it so
thoroughly, that no one suspected the real grief which she looked
upon as rebellion to the will of God. Conservative in thought and
training, and with the sense of humor which might have lightened
some phases of the new dispensation, almost destroyed by the
Puritan faith, which more and more altered the proportions of
things, making life only a grim battle with evil, and the days
doings of absolute unimportance save as they advanced one toward
heaven, she accepted discomfort or hardship with quiet patience.

There must have been unfailing interest, too, in the perpetual
chances and changes of the perilous voyage. They had weighed anchor
finally on the 8th of April, and were well under way on the morning
of the 9th, when their journey seemed suddenly likely to end then
and there. The war between Spain and England was still going on, and
privateers known as Dunkirkers, were lying in wait before every
English harbor. Thus there was reason enough for apprehension, when,
"In the morning we descried from the top, eight sail astern of
us.... We supposing they might be Dunkirkers, our captain caused the
gun room and gun deck to be cleared; all the hammocks were taken
down, our ordnance loaded, and our powder chests and fireworks made
ready, and our landmen quartered among the seamen, and twenty-five
of them appointed for muskets, and every man written down for his
quarter.

"The wind continued N. with fair weather, and after noon it
calmed, and we still saw those eight ships to stand towards us;
having more wind than we, they came up apace, so as our captain
and the masters of our consorts were more occasioned to think they
might be Dunkirkers, (for we were told at Yarmouth, that there
were ten sail of them waiting for us); whereupon we all prepared
to fight with them, and took down some cabins which were in the
way of our ordnance, and out of every ship were thrown such bed
matters as were subject to take fire, and we heaved out our long
boats and put up our waste cloths, and drew forth our men and
armed them with muskets and other weapons, and instruments for
fireworks; and for an experiment our captain shot a ball of wild
fire fastened to an arrow out of a cross bow, which burnt in the
water a good time. The lady Arbella and the other women and
children, were removed into the lower deck, that they might be out
of danger. All things being thus fitted, we went to prayer upon
the upper deck. It was much to see how cheerful and comfortable
all the company appeared; not a woman or child that shewed fear,
though all did apprehend the danger to have been great, if things
had proved as might well be expected, for there had been eight
against four, and the least of the enemy's ships were reported to
carry thirty brass pieces; but our trust was in the Lord of Hosts;
and the courage of our captain, and his care and diligence did
much to encourage us.

"It was now about one of the clock, and the fleet seemed to be
within a league of us; therefore our captain, because he would
show he was not afraid of them, and that he might see the issue
before night should overtake us, tacked about and stood to meet
them, and when we came near we perceived them to be our friends--
the little Neptune, a ship of some twenty pieces of ordnance, and
her two consorts, bound for the Straits, a ship of Flushing, and a
Frenchman and three other English ships bound for Canada and
Newfoundland. So when we drew near, every ship (as they met)
saluted each other, and the musketeers discharged their small
shot, and so (God be praised) our fear and danger was turned into
mirth and friendly entertainment. Our danger being thus over, we
espied two boats on fishing in the channel; so every one of our
four ships manned out a skiff, and we bought of them great store
of excellent fresh fish of divers sorts."

It is an astonishing fact, that no line in Anne Bradstreet's poems
has any reference to this experience which held every alternation
of hope and fear, and which must have moved them beyond any other
happening of the long voyage. But, inward states, then as
afterward, were the only facts that seemed worthy of expression,
so far as she personally was concerned, and they were all keyed to
a pitch which made danger even welcome, as a test of endurance and
genuine purpose. But we can fancy the dismay of every house-wife
as the limited supply of "bed matters," went the way of many other
things "subject to take fire." Necessarily the household goods of
each had been reduced to the very lowest terms, and as the
precious rugs and blankets sunk slowly, or for a time defied the
waves and were tossed from crest to crest, we may be sure that the
heart of every woman, in the end at least, desired sorely that
rescue might be attempted. Sheets had been dispensed with, to
avoid the accumulation of soiled linen, for the washing of which
no facilities could be provided, and Winthrop wrote of his boys to
his wife in one of his last letters, written as they rode at
anchor before Cowes, "They lie both with me, and sleep as soundly
in a rug (for we use no sheets here) as ever they did at Groton;
and so I do myself, (I praise God)."

Among minor trials this was not the least, for the comfort we
associate with English homes, had developed, under the Puritan
love of home, to a degree that even in the best days of the
Elizabethan time was utterly unknown. The faith which demanded
absolute purity of life, included the beginning of that
cleanliness which is "next to godliness," if not an inherent part
of godliness itself, and fine linen on bed and table had become
more and more a necessity. The dainty, exquisite neatness that in
the past has been inseparable from the idea of New England, began
with these Puritan dames, who set their floating home in such
order as they could, and who seized the last opportunity at
Yarmouth of going on shore, not only for refreshment, but to wash
neckbands and other small adornments, which waited two months for
any further treatment of this nature.

There were many resources, not only in needlework and the
necessary routine of each day, but in each other. The two
daughters of Sir Robert Saltonstall, Mrs. Phillips the minister's
wife, the wives of Nowell, Coddington and others made up the group
of gentlewomen who dined with Lady Arbella in "the great cabin,"
the greatness of which will be realized when the reader reflects
that the ship was but three hundred and fifty tons burden and
could carry aside from the fifty or so sailors, but thirty
passengers, among whom were numbered various discreet and
reputable "young gentlemen" who, as Winthrop wrote, "behave
themselves well, and are conformable to all good orders," one or
two of whom so utilized their leisure that the landing found them
ready for the marriage bells that even Puritan asceticism still
allowed to be rung.

Disaster waited upon them, even when fairly under way. Winthrop,
whose family affection was intense, and whose only solace in
parting with his wife had been, that a greatly loved older son, as
well as two younger ones were his companions, had a sore
disappointment, entered in the journal, with little comment on its
personal bearings. "The day we set sail from Cowes, my son Henry
Winthrop went on shore with one of my servants, to fetch an ox and
ten wethers, which he had provided for our ship, and there went on
shore with him Mr. Pelham and one of his servants. They sent the
cattle aboard, but returned not themselves. About three days after
my servant and a servant of Mr. Pelham's came to us in Yarmouth,
and told us they were all coming to us in a boat the day before,
but the wind was so strong against them as they were forced on
shore in the night, and the two servants came to Yarmouth by land,
and so came on shipboard, but my son and Mr. Pelham (we heard)
went back to the Cowes and so to Hampton. We expected them three
or four days after, but they came not to us, so we have left them
behind, and suppose they will come after in Mr. Goffe's ships. We
were very sorry they had put themselves upon such inconvenience
when they were so well accommodated in our ship."

A fresh gale on the day of this entry encouraged them all; they
passed the perils of Scilly and looked for no further delay when a
fresh annoyance was encountered which, for the moment, held for
the women at least, something of the terror of their meeting with
supposed "Dunkirkers."

"About eight in the morning, ... standing to the W. S. W. we met
two small ships, which falling in among us, and the Admiral coming
under our lee, we let him pass, but the Jewel and Ambrose,
perceiving the other to be a Brazilman, and to take the wind of
us, shot at them, and made them stop and fall after us, and sent a
skiff aboard them to know what they were. Our captain, fearing
lest some mistake might arise, and lest they should take them for
enemies which were friends, and so, through the unruliness of the
mariners some wrong might be done them, caused his skiff to be
heaved out, and sent Mr. Graves, one of his mates and our pilot (a
discreet man) to see how things were, who returned soon after, and
brought with him the master of one of the ships, and Mr. Lowe and
Mr. Hurlston. When they were come aboard to us, they agreed to
send for the captain, who came and showed his commission from the
Prince of Orange. In conclusion he proved to be a Dutchmen, and
his a man of war from Flushing, and the other ship was a prize he
had taken, laden with sugar and tobacco; so we sent them aboard
their ships again, and held on our course. In this time (which
hindered us five or six leagues) the Jewel and the Ambrose came
foul of each other, so as we much feared the issue, but, through
God's mercy, they came well off again, only the Jewel had her
foresail torn, and one of her anchors broken. This occasion and
the sickness of our minister and people, put us all out of order
this day, so as we could have no sermons."

No words hold greater force of discomfort and deprivation than
that one line, "so as we could have no sermons," for the capacity
for this form of "temperate entertainment," had increased in such
ratio, that the people sat spell bound, four hours at a stretch,
both hearers and speaker being equally absorbed. Winthrop had
written of himself at eighteen, in his "Christain Experience": "I
had an insatiable thirst after the word of God; and could not
misse a good sermon, though many miles off, especially of such as
did search deep into the conscience," and to miss this refreshment
even for a day, seemed just so much loss of the needed spiritual
food.

But the wind, which blew "a stiffe gale," had no respect of
persons, and all were groaning together till the afternoon of the
next day, when a device occurred to some inventive mind, possibly
that of Mistress Bradstreet herself, which was immediately carried
out. "Our children and others that were sick and lay groaning in
the cabins, we fetched out, and having stretched a rope from the
steerage to the main mast, we made them stand, some of one side
and some of the other, and sway it up and down till they were
warm, and by this means they soon grew well and merry."

The plan worked well, and three days later, when the wind which
had quieted somewhat, again blew a "stiffe gale," he was able to
write: "This day the ship heaved and set more than before, yet we
had but few sick, and of these such as came up upon the deck and
stirred themselves, were presently well again; therefore our
captain set our children and young men, to some harmless
exercises, which the seamen were very active in, and did our
people much good, though they would sometimes play the wags with
them."

Wind and rain, rising often till the one was a gale and the other
torrents, gave them small rest in that first week. The fish they
had secured at Yarmouth returned to their own element, Winthrop
mourning them as he wrote: "The storm was so great as it split our
foresail and tore it in pieces, and a knot of the sea washed our
tub overboard, wherein our fish was a-watering." The children had
become good sailers, and only those were sick, who, like "the
women kept under hatches." The suffering from cold was constant,
and for a fortnight extreme, the Journal reading: "I wish,
therefore, that all such as shall pass this way in the spring have
care to provide warm clothing; for nothing breeds more trouble and
danger of sickness, in this season, than cold."

From day to day the little fleet exchanged signals, and now and
then, when calm enough the masters of the various ships dined in
the round-house of the Arbella, and exchanged news, as that, "all
their people were in health, but one of their cows was dead." Two
ships in the distance on the 24th of April, disturbed them for a
time, but they proved to be friends, who saluted and "conferred
together so long, till his Vice Admiral was becalmed by our sails,
and we were foul one of another, but there being little wind and
the sea calm, we kept them asunder with oars, etc., till they
heaved out their boat, and so towed their ship away. They told us
for certain, that the king of France had set out six of his own
ships to recover the fort from them."

Here was matter for talk among the travellers, whose interest in
all that touched their future heightened day by day, and the item,
with its troublous implications may have been the foundation of
one of the numerous fasts recorded.

May brought no suggestion of any quiet, though three weeks out,
they had made but three hundred leagues, and the month opened with
"a very great tempest all the night, with fierce showers of rain
intermixed, and very cold.... Yet through God's mercy, we were
very comfortable and few or none sick, but had opportunity to keep
the Sabbath, and Mr. Phillips preached twice that day."

Discipline was of the sharpest, the Puritan temper brooking no
infractions of law and order. There were uneasy and turbulent
spirits both among the crew and passengers, and in the beginning
swift judgment fell upon two young men, who, "falling at odds and
fighting, contrary to the orders which we had published and set up
in the ship, were adjudged to walk upon the deck till night, with
their hands bound behind them, which accordingly was executed; and
another man for using contemptuous speeches in our presence, was
laid in bolts till he submitted himself and promised open
confession of his offence."

Impressive as this undoubtedly proved to the "children and youth
thereby admonished," a still greater sensation was felt among them
on the discovery that "a servant of one of our company had
bargained with a child to sell him a box worth three-pence for
three biscuits a day all the voyage, and had received about forty
and had sold them and many more to some other servants. We caused
his hands to be tied up to a bar, and hanged a basket with stones
about his neck, and so he stood two hours."

Other fights are recorded, the cause a very evident one. "We
observed it a common fault in our young people that they gave
themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately."

Brandy then as now was looked upon as a specific for sea-sickness,
and "a maid servant in the ship, being stomach sick, drank so much
strong water, that she was senseless, and had near killed
herself."

The constant cold and rain, the monotonous food, which before port
was reached had occasioned many cases of scurvy and reduced the
strength of all, was excuse enough for the occasional lapse into
overindulgence which occurred, but the long penance was nearly
ended. On the 8th of June Mount Mansell, now Mt. Desert, was
passed, an enchanting sight for the sea-sad eyes of the
travellers. A "handsome gale" drove them swiftly on, and we may
know with what interest they crowded the decks and gazed upon
these first glimpses of the new home. As they sailed, keeping well
in to shore, and making the new features of hill and meadow and
unfamiliar trees, Winthrop wrote: "We had now fair sunshine
weather, and so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us, and
there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden."

Peril was past, and though fitful winds still tormented them, the
12th of May saw the long imprisonment ended, and they dropped
anchor "a little within the islands," in the haven where they
would be.




CHAPTER IV.

BEGINNINGS.


There are travellers who insist that, as they near American shores
in May or early June, the smell of corn-blossom is on the wind,
miles out at sea, a delicate, distinct, penetrating odor, as
thoroughly American as the clearness of the sky and the pure, fine
quality in the air. The wild grape, growing as profusely to-day on
the Cape as two hundred years ago, is even more powerful, the
subtle, delicious fragrance making itself felt as soon as one
approaches land. The "fine, fresh smell like a garden," which
Winthrop notes more than once, came to them on every breeze from
the blossoming land. Every charm of the short New England summer
waited for them. They had not, like the first comers to that coast
to disembark in the midst of ice and snow, but green hills sloped
down to the sea, and wild strawberries were growing almost at
high-tide mark. The profusion of flowers and berries had rejoiced
Higginson in the previous year, their men rowing at once to "Ten
Pound Island," and bringing back, he writes: "ripe strawberries
and gooseberries and sweet single roses. Thus God was merciful to
us in giving us a taste and smell of the sweet fruit, as an
earnest of his bountiful goodness to welcome us at our first
arrival."

But no fairness of Nature could undo the sad impression of the
first hour in the little colony at Salem, where the Arbella
landed, three days before her companions reached there. Their own
cares would have seemed heavy enough, but the winter had been a
terrible one, and Dudley wrote later in his letter to the Countess
of Lincoln: "We found the Colony in a sad and unexpected
condition, above eighty of them being dead the winter before; and
many of those alive, weak and sick; all the corn and bread amongst
them all, hardly sufficient to feed them a fortnight, insomuch
that the remainder of a hundred and eighty servants we had the two
years before sent over, coming to us for victuals to sustain them,
we found ourselves wholly unable to feed them, by reason that the
provisions shipped for them were taken out of the ship they were
put in, and they who were trusted to ship them in another, failed
us and left them behind; whereupon necessity enforced us, to our
extreme loss, to give them all liberty, who had cost us about L16
or L20 a person, furnishing and sending over."

Salem holding only discouragement, they left it, exploring the
Charles and the Mystic Rivers, and finally joining the settlement
at Charlestown, to which Francis Higginson had gone the previous
year, and which proved to be in nearly as desperate case as Salem.
The Charlestown records as given in Young's "Chronicles of
Massachusetts," tell the story of the first days of attempt at
organization. The goods had all been unshipped at Salem and were
not brought to Charlestown until July. In the meantime, "The
Governor and several of the Patentees dwelt in the great house
which was last year built in this town by Mr. Graves and the rest
of their servants. The multitude set up cottages, booths and tents
about the Town Hill. They had long passage; some of the ships were
seventeen, some eighteen weeks a coming. Many people arrived sick
of the scurvy, which also increased much after their arrival, for
want of houses, and by reason of wet lodging in their cottages,
etc. Other distempers also prevailed; and although [the] people
were generally very loving and pitiful, yet the sickness did so
prevail, that the whole were not able to tend the sick as they
should be tended; upon which many perished and died, and were
buried about the Town Hill."

Saddest of all among these deaths must have been that of the Lady
Arbella, of whom Mather in a later day, wrote: "She came from a
paradise of plenty and pleasure, in the family of a noble earldom,
into a wilderness of wants, and took New England in her way to
heaven." There had been doubt as to the expediency of her coming,
but with the wife of another explorer she had said: "Whithersoever
your fatal destiny shall drive you, either by the waves of the
great ocean, or by the manifold and horrible dangers of the land,
I will surely bear you company. There can no peril chance to me so
terrible, nor any kind of death so cruel, that shall not be much
easier for me to abide, than to live so far separate from you."

Weakened by the long voyage and its perpetual hardships, and
dismayed, if may be at the sadness and privations of what they had
hoped might hold immediate comfort, she could not rally, and Anne
Bradstreet's first experience of New England was over the grave,
in which they laid one of the closest links to childhood and that
England both had loved alike.

Within a month, Winthrop wrote in his journal: "September 30.
About two in the morning, Mr. Isaac Johnson died; his wife, the
lady Arbella, of the house of Lincoln, being dead about one month
before. He was a holy man and wise, and died in sweet peace,
leaving some part of his substance to the Colony."

               "He tried
  To live without her, liked it not and died."

Still another tragedy had saddened them all, though in the press
of overwhelming business, Winthrop wrote only: "Friday, July 2. My
son Henry Winthrop drowned at Salem," and there is no other
mention of himself till July 16, when he wrote the first letter to
his wife from America.

The loss was a heavy one to the colony as well as the father, for
Henry Winthrop, though but twenty-two, had already had experience
as a pioneer, having gone out to Barbadoes at eighteen, and became
one of the earliest planters in that island. Ardent, energetic,
and with his fathers deep tenderness for all who depended on him,
he was one who could least be spared. "A sprightly and hopeful
young gentleman he was," says Hubbard, and another chronicle gives
more minute details. "The very day on which he went on shore in
New England, he and the principal officers of the ship, walking
out to a place now called by the Salemites, Northfield, to view
the Indian wigwams, they saw on the other side of the river a
small canoe. He would have had one of the company swim over and
fetch it, rather than walk several miles on foot, it being very
hot weather; but none of the party could swim but himself; and so
he plunged in, and, as he was swimming over, was taken with the
cramp a few roods from the shore and drowned."

The father's letter is filled with an anguish of pity for the
mother and the young wife, whose health, like that of the elder
Mrs. Winthrop, had made the journey impossible for both.

"I am so overpressed with business, as I have no time for these or
other mine own private occasions. I only write now that thou
mayest know, that yet I live and am mindful of thee in all my
affairs. The larger discourse of all things thou shalt receive
from my brother Downing, which I must send by some of the last
ships. We have met with many sad and discomfortable things as thou
shalt hear after; and the Lord's hand hath been heavy upon myself
in some very near to me. My son Henry! My son Henry! Ah, poor
child! Yet it grieves me much more for my dear daughter. The Lord
strengthen and comfort her heart to bear this cross patiently. I
know thou wilt not be wanting to her in this distress."

Not one of the little colony was wanting in tender offices in
these early days when a common suffering made them "very pitiful
one to another," and as the absolutely essential business was
disposed of they hastened to organize the church where free
worship should make amends for all the long sorrow of its search.

A portion of the people from the Arbella had remained in Salem,
but on Friday, July 3Oth, 1630, Winthrop, Dudley, Johnson and
Wilson entered into a church covenant, which was signed two days
after by Increase Nowell and four others--Sharpe, Bradstreet,
Gager and Colborne.

It is most probable that Anne Bradstreet had been temporarily
separated from her husband, as Johnson in his "Wonder-working
Providence," writes, that after the arrival at Salem, "the lady
Arrabella and some other godly women aboad at Salem, but their
husbands continued at Charles Town, both for the settling the
Civill Government and gathering another Church of Christ." The
delay was a short one, for her name stands thirteenth on the list.
Charlestown, however, held hardly more promise of quiet life than
Salem. The water supply was, curiously enough, on a peninsula
which later gave excellent water, only "a brackish spring in the
sands by the water side ... which could not supply half the
necessities of the multitude, at which time the death of so many
was concluded to be much the more occasioned by this want of good
water."

Heat was another evil to the constitutions which knew only the
equable English temperature, and could not face either the intense
sun, or the sudden changes of the most erratic climate the earth
knows. In the search for running-water, the colonists scattered,
moving from point to point, "the Governor, the Deputy-Governor and
all the assistants except Mr. Nowell going across the river to
Boston at the invitation of Mr. Blaxton, who had until then been
its only white inhabitant."

Even the best supplied among them were but scantily provided with
provisions. It was too late for planting, and the colony already
established was too wasted and weakened by sickness to have cared
for crops in the planting season. In the long voyage "there was
miserable damage and spoil of provisions by sea, and divers came
not so well provided as they would, upon a report, whilst they
were in England, that now there was enough in New England." Even
this small store was made smaller by the folly of several who
exchanged food for beaver skins, and, the Council suddenly finding
that famine was imminent "hired and despatched away Mr. William
Pearce with his ship of about two hundred tons, for Ireland to buy
more, and in the mean time went on with their work of settling."

The last month of the year had come before they could decide where
the fortified town, made necessary by Indian hostilities, should
be located. The Governor's house had been partly framed at
Charlestown, but with the removal to Boston it was taken down, and
finally Cambridge was settled upon as the most desirable point,
and their first winter was spent there. Here for the first time it
was possible for Anne Bradstreet to unpack their household
belongings, and seek to create some semblance of the forsaken
home. But even for the Dudleys, among the richest members of the
party there was a privation which shows how sharply it must have
fared with the poorer portion, and Dudley wrote, nine months after
their arrival, that he "thought fit to commit to memory our
present condition, and what hath befallen us since our arrival
here; which I will do shortly, after my usual manner, and must do
rudely, having yet no table, nor other room to write in than by
the fireside upon my knee, in this sharp winter; to which my
family must have leave to resort, though they break good manners,
and make me many times forget what I would say, and say what I
would not."

No word of Mistress Dudley's remains to tell the shifts and
strivings for comfort in that miserable winter which, mild as it
was, had a keenness they were ill prepared to face. Petty miseries
and deprivations, the least endurable of all forms of suffering,
surrounded them like a cloud of stinging insects, whose attacks,
however intolerable at the moment, are forgotten with the passing,
and either for this reason, or from deliberate purpose, there is
not a line of reference to them in any of Anne Bradstreet's
writings. Scarcity of food was the sorest trouble. The Charlestown
records show that "people were necessitated to live upon clams and
muscles and ground nuts and acorns, and these got with much
difficulty in the winter-time. People were very much tried and
discouraged, especially when they heard that the Governor himself
had the last batch of bread in the oven."

All fared alike so far as possible, the richer and more provident
distributing to the poor, and all watching eagerly for the ship
sent back in July in anticipation of precisely such a crisis. Six
months had passed, when, on the fifth of February, 1631, Mather
records that as Winthrop stood at his door giving "the last
handful of meal in the barrel unto a poor man distressed by the
wolf at the door, at that instant, they spied a ship arrived at
the harbor's mouth with provisions for them all." The Fast day
just appointed became one of rejoicing, the first formal
proclamation for Thanksgiving Day being issued, "by order of the
Governour and Council, directed to all the plantations, and though
the stores held little reminder of holiday time in Old England,
grateful hearts did not stop to weigh differences. In any case the
worst was past and early spring brought the hope of substantial
comfort, for the town was 'laid out in squares, the streets
intersecting each other at right-angles,' and houses were built
as rapidly as their small force of carpenters could work.
Bradstreet's house was at the corner of 'Brayntree' and Wood
Streets, the spot now occupied by the familiar University Book-
store of Messrs. Sever and Francis on Harvard Square, his plot of
ground being 'aboute one rood,' and Dudley's on a lot of half an
acre was but a little distance from them at the corner of the
present Dunster and South Streets." Governor Winthrop's decision
not to remain here, brought about some sharp correspondence
between Dudley and himself, but an amicable settlement followed
after a time, and though the frame of his house was removed to
Boston, the town grew in spite of its loss, so swiftly that in
1633, Wood wrote of it:

"This is one of the neatest and best compacted Towns in New
England, having many fair structures, with many handsome contrived
streets. The inhabitants most of them are very rich and well
stored with Cattell of all sorts."

Rich as they may have appeared, however, in comparison with many
of the settlements about them, sickness and want were still
unwelcome guests among them, so that Dudley wrote: "there is not a
house where there is not one dead and in some houses many. The
natural causes seem to be in the want of warm lodging and good
diet, to which Englishmen are habituated at home, and in the
sudden increase of heat which they endure that are landed here in
summer, the salt meats at sea having prepared their bodies
thereto; for those only these two last years died of fevers who
landed in June and July; as those of Plymouth, who landed in
winter, died of the scurvey, as did our poorer sort, whose houses
and bedding kept them not sufficiently warm, nor their diet
sufficiently in heart."

Thus far there were small inducements for further emigration. The
tide poured in steadily, but only because worse evils were behind
than semi-starvation in New England. The fairest and fullest
warning was given by Dudley, whose letter holds every strait and
struggle of the first year, and who wrote with the intention of
counteracting the too rosy statements of Higginson and Graves: "If
any come hither to plant for worldly ends that can live well at
home, he commits an error, of which he will soon repent him; but
if for spiritual, and that no particular obstacle hinder his
removal, he may find here what may well content him, viz.,
materials to build, fuel to burn, ground to plant, seas and rivers
to fish in, a pure air to breathe in, good water to drink till
wine or beer can be made; which together with the cows, hogs and
goats brought hither already, may suffice for food; for as for
fowl and venison, they are dainties here as well as in England.
For clothes and bedding, they must bring them with them, till time
and industry produce them here. In a word, we yet enjoy little to
be envied, but endure much to be pitied in the sickness and
mortality of our people. And I do the more willingly use this open
and plain dealing, lest other men should fall short of their
expectations when they come hither, as we to our great prejudice
did, by means of letters sent us from hence into England, wherein
honest men, out of a desire to draw over others to them, wrote
something hyperbolically of many things here. If any godly men,
out of religious ends, will come over to help us in the good work
we are about, I think they cannot dispose of themselves nor their
estates more to God's glory and the furtherance of their own
reckoning. But they must not be of the poorer sort yet, for divers
years; for we have found by experience that they have hindered,
not furthered the work. And for profane and debauched persons,
their oversight in coming hither is wondered at, where they shall
find nothing to content them."

This long quotation is given in full to show the fair temper of
the man, who as time went on was slightly less in favor than in
the beginning. No one questioned his devotion to the cause, or the
energy with which he worked for it, but as he grew older he lost
some portion of the old urbanity, exchanging it disastrously for
traits which would seem to have been the result of increasing
narrowness of religious faith rather than part of his real self.
Savage writes of him: "a hardness in publick and ridgidity in
private life, are too observable in his character, and even an
eagerness for pecuniary gain, which might not have been expected
in a soldier and a statesman." That the impression was general is
evident from an epitaph written upon him by Governor Belcher, who
may, however, have had some personal encounter with this
"rigidity," which was applied to all without fear or favor.

  "Here lies Thomas Dudley, that trusty old stud,
  A bargain's a bargain and must be made good."

Whatever his tendencies may have been they did not weigh heavily
on his family, who delighted in his learning and devoted spirit,
and whose affection was strong enough to atone for any criticism
from outsiders.

Objectionable as his methods may sometimes have been--sour as his
compatriots now and then are said to have found him, "the world it
appears, is indebted for much of its progress, to uncomfortable
and even grumpy people," and Tyler whose analysis of the Puritan
character has never been surpassed, writes of them: "Even some of
the best of them, perhaps, would have seemed to us 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. Certainly ... they do not seem to have
been a company of gentle, dreamy and euphemistical saints, with a
particular aptitude for martyrdom and an inordinate development of
affability."

They argued incessantly, at home and abroad, and "this exacting
and tenacious propensity of theirs, was not a little criticized by
some who had business connections with them." Very probably
Governor Belcher had been worsted in some wordy battle, always
decorously conducted, but always persistent, but these minor
infelicities did not affect the main purposes of life, and the
settlement grew in spite of them; perhaps even, because of them,
free speech being, as yet, the privilege of all, though as the
answering became in time a little too free, means were taken to
insure more discretion.

In the meantime Cambridge grew, and suddenly arose a complaint,
which to the modern mind is preposterous. "Want of room" was the
cry of every citizen and possibly with justice, as the town had
been set within fixed limits and had nearly doubled in size
through the addition in August, 1632, of the congregation of the
Rev. Thomas Hooker at Chelmsford in the county of Essex, England,
who had fallen under Laud's displeasure, and escaped with
difficulty, being pursued by the officers of the High Commission
from one county to another, and barely eluding them when he took
ship for New England.

One would have thought the wilderness at their doors afforded
sense of room enough, and that numbers would have been a welcome
change, but the complaint was serious enough to warrant their
sending out men to Ipswich with a view of settling there. Then for
a time the question dropped, much to the satisfaction, no doubt,
of Mistress Dudley and her daughter, to whom in 1633, or '34, the
date being uncertain, came her first child, the son Samuel, who
graduated at Harvard College in 1653, and of whom she wrote long
after in the little diary of "Religious Experiences":

"It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child, which was
a great greif to me, and cost mee many prayers and tears before I
obtained one, and after him gave mee many more of whom I now take
the care."

Cambridge still insisting that it had not room enough, the town
was enlarged, but having accomplished this, both Dudley and
Bradstreet left it for Ipswich, the first suggestion of which had
been made in January, 1632, when news came to them that "the
French had bought the Scottish plantation near Cape Sable, and
that the fort and all the amunition were delivered to them, and
that the cardinal, having the managing thereof, had sent many
companies already, and preparation was made to send many more the
next year, and divers priests and Jesuits among them---called the
assistants to Boston, and the ministers and captains, and some
other chief men, to advise what was fit to be done for our safety,
in regard the French were like to prove ill neighbors, (being
Papists)."

Another change was in store for the patient women who followed the
path laid open before them, with no thought of opposition,
desiring only "room for such life as should in the ende return
them heaven for an home that passeth not away," and with the
record in Winthrop's journal, came the familiar discussion as to
methods, and the decision which speedily followed.

Dudley and Bradstreet as "assistants" both had voice in the
conclusions of the meeting, the record of which has just been
given, though with no idea, probably, at that time, that their own
movements would be affected. It was settled at once that "a
plantation and a fort should be begun at Natascott, partly to be
some block in an enemy's way (though it could not bar his
entrance), and especially to prevent an enemy from taking that
passage from us.... Also, that a plantation be begun at Agawam
(being the best place in the land for tillage and cattle), least
an enemy, finding it void should possess and take it from us. The
governor's son (being one of the assistants) was to undertake
this, and to take no more out of the bay than twelve men; the rest
to be supplied, at the coming of the next ships."

That they were not essential to Cambridge, but absolutely so at
this weak point was plain to both Dudley and Bradstreet, who
forthwith made ready for the change accomplished in 1634, when at
least one other child, Dorothy, had come to Anne Bradstreet.
Health, always delicate and always fluctuating, was affected more
seriously than usual at this time, no date being given, but the
period extending over several years, "After some time, I fell into
a lingering sickness like a consumption, together with a lameness,
which correction I saw the Lord sent to humble and try me and do
me Good: and it was not altogether ineffectual."

Patient soul! There were better days coming, but, self-distrust
was, after her affections, her strongest point, and there is small
hint of inward poise or calmness till years had passed, though she
faced each change with the quiet dauntlessness that was part of
her birthright. But the tragedy of their early days in the colony
still shadowed her. Evidently no natural voice was allowed to
speak in her, and the first poem of which we have record is as
destitude of any poetic flavor, as if designed for the Bay Psalm-
book. As the first, however, it demands place, if only to show
from what she afterward escaped. That she preserved it simply as a
record of a mental state, is evident from the fact, that it was
never included in any edition of her poems, it having been found
among her papers after her death.

  UPON A FIT OF SICKNESS, _Anno_. 1632.
  _Aetatis suce_, 19.

  Twice ten years old not fully told since
      nature gave me breath,
  My race is run, my thread is spun, lo! here
      is fatal Death.
  All men must dye, and so must I, this cannot
      be revoked,
  For Adam's sake, this word God spake, when he
      so high provoke'd.
  Yet live I shall, this life's but small, in
      place of highest bliss,
  Where I shall have all I can crave, no life is
      like to this.
  For what's this life but care and strife? since
      first we came from womb,
  Our strength doth waste, our time doth hast and
      then we go to th' Tomb.
  O Bubble blast, how long can'st last? that
      always art a breaking,
  No sooner blown, but dead and gone ev'n as a
      word that's speaking,
  O whil'st I live this grace me give, I doing good
      may be,
  Then death's arrest I shall count best because
      it's thy degree.
  Bestow much cost, there's nothing lost to make
      Salvation sure,
  O great's the gain, though got with pain, comes
      by profession pure.
  The race is run, the field is won, the victory's
      mine, I see,
  For ever know thou envious foe the foyle belongs
      to thee.

This is simply very pious and unexceptionable doggerel and no one
would admit such fact more quickly than Mistress Anne herself, who
laid it away in after days in her drawer, with a smile at the
metre and a sigh for the miserable time it chronicled. There were
many of them, for among the same papers is a shorter burst of
trouble:

  UPON SOME DISTEMPER OF BODY.

  In anguish of my heart repleat with woes,
  And wasting pains, which best my body knows,
  In tossing slumbers on my wakeful bed,
  Bedrencht with tears that flow from mournful head,
  Till nature had exhausted all her store,
  Then eyes lay dry disabled to weep more;
  And looking up unto his Throne on high,
  Who sendeth help to those in misery;
  He chas'd away those clouds and let me see,
  My Anchor cast i' th' vale with safety,
  He eas'd my soul of woe, my flesh of pain,
  And brought me to the shore from troubled Main.

The same brooding and saddened spirit is found in some verses of
the same period and written probably just before the birth of her
third child, the latter part containing a touch of jealous
apprehension that has been the portion of many a young mother, and
that indicates more of human passion than could be inferred from
anything in her first attempt at verse.

  All things within this fading world hath end,
  Adversity doth still our joys attend;
  No tyes so strong, no friends so dear and sweet
  But with death's parting blow is sure to meet.
  The sentence past is most irrevocable
  A common thing, yet oh, inevitable;
  How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
  How soon 't may be thy Lot to lose thy friend!
  We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
  These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
  That when that knot's untyed that made us one,
  I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
  And if I see not half my dayes that's due,
  What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
  The many faults that well you know I have,
  Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
  If any worth or virtue were in me,
  Let that live freshly in thy memory,
  And when thou feel'st no grief as I no harms,
  Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms:
  And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
  Look to my little babes my dear remains,
  And if thou love thyself, or loved'st me,
  These O protect from step-Dames injury.
  And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
  With some sad sighs honor my absent Herse;
  And kiss this paper for thy love's dear sake
  Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.
                                   --_A. B._




CHAPTER V.

OLD FRIENDS AND NEW.


In spite of the fits of depression evident in most of the
quotations thus far given, there were many alleviations, as life
settled into more tolerable conditions, and one chief one was now
very near. Probably no event in the first years of Anne
Bradstreet's life in the little colony had as much significance
for her as the arrival at Boston in 1633, of the Rev. John Cotton,
her father's friend, and one of the strongest influences in the
lives of both English and American Puritans. She was still living
in Cambridge and very probably made one of the party who went in
from there to hear his first sermon before the Boston church. He
had escaped from England with the utmost difficulty, the time of
freedom allowed him by King James who admired his learning, having
ended so thoroughly that he was hunted like an escaped convict.
Fearless and almost reckless, the Colonial ministers wondered at
his boldness, a brother of Nathaniel Ward saying as he and some
friends "spake merrily" together: "Of all men in the world, I envy
Mr. Cotton of Boston, most; for he doth nothing in way of
conformity, and yet hath his liberty, and I do everything in that
way and cannot enjoy mine."

The child born on the stormy passage over, and who in good time
became Anne Bradstreet's son-in-law, marrying her daughter Dorothy
in 1654, appeared with the father and mother at the first public
service after his arrival, and before it was positively decided
that he should remain in Boston. The baptism, contrary to the
usual custom of having it take place, not later than ten days
after birth, had been delayed, and Winthrop gives a characteristic
picture of the scene: "The Lord's day following, he (Mr. Cotton)
exercised in the afternoon, and being to be admitted, he signified
his desire and readiness to make his confession according to
order, which he said might be sufficient in declaring his faith
about baptism (which he then desired for their child, born in
their passage, and therefore named Seaborn). He gave two reasons
why he did not baptize it at sea (not for want of fresh water, for
he held sea-water would have served): 1st, because they had no
settled congregation there; 2d, because a minister hath no power
to give the seals, but in his own congregation."

Some slight question, as to whether Boston alone, or the colony at
large should be taxed for his support was settled with little
difficulty, and on Sept. 10, another gathering from all the
neighboring towns, witnessed his induction into the new church a
ceremony of peculiar solemnity, preceded by a fast, and followed
by such feasting as the still narrow stores of the people
admitted.

No one can estimate the importance of this occasion, who does not
realize what a minister meant in those first days, when the sermon
held for the majority the sole opportunity of intellectual
stimulus as well as spiritual growth. The coming of John Cotton to
Boston, was much as if Phillips Brooks should bestow himself upon
the remotest English settlement in Australia, or a missionary
station in northern Minnesota, and a ripple of excitement ran
through the whole community. It meant keener political as well as
religious life, for the two went side by side. Mather wrote later
of New England: "It is a country whose interests were most
remarkably and generally enwrapped in its ecclesiastical
circumstances," and he added: "The gospel has evidently been the
making of our towns."

It was the deacons and elders who ruled public affairs, always
under direction of well-nigh supreme authority vested in the
minister. There was reason for such faith in them. "The objects of
much public deference were not unaware of their authority; they
seldom abused it; they never forgot it. If ever men, for real
worth and greatness, deserved such pre-eminence, they did; they
had wisdom, great learning, great force of will, devout
consecration, philanthropy, purity of life. For once in the
history of the world, the sovereign places were filled by the
sovereign men. They bore themselves with the air of leaderships;
they had the port of philosophers, noblemen and kings. The
writings of our earliest times are full of reference to the
majesty of their looks, the awe inspired by their presence, the
grandeur and power of their words."

New England surely owes something of her gift of "ready and
commanding speech," to these early talkers, who put their whole
intellectual force into a sermon, and who thought nothing of a
prayer lasting for two hours and a sermon for three or even four.
Nathaniel Ward, whose caustic wit spared neither himself nor the
most reverend among his brethren, wrote in his "Simple Cobbler":
"We have a strong weakness in New England, that when we are
speaking, we know not how to conclude. We make many ends, before
we make an end.... We cannot help it, though we can; which is the
arch infirmity in all morality. We are so near the west pole, that
our longitudes are as long as any wise man would wish and somewhat
longer. I scarce know any adage more grateful than '_Grata
brevitas_'."

Mr. Cotton was no exception to this rule, but his hearers would
not have had him shorter. It was, however, the personality of the
man that carried weight and nothing that he has left for a mocking
generation to wonder over gives slightest hint of reason for the
spell he cast over congregations, under the cathedral towers, or
in the simple meeting house in the new Boston. The one man alive,
who, perhaps, has gone through his works conscientiously and
hopefully, Moses Coit Tyler, writes of John Cotton's works: "These
are indeed clear and cogent in reasoning; the language is well
enough, but that is all. There are almost no remarkable merits in
thought or style. One wanders through these vast tracts and
jungles of Puritanic discourse--exposition, exhortation, logic-
chopping, theological hair-splitting--and is unrewarded by a
single passage of eminent force or beauty, uncheered even by the
felicity of a new epithet in the objurgation of sinners, or a new
tint in the landscape-painting of hell."

Hubbard wrote, while he still lived: "Mr. Cotton had such an
insinuating and melting way in his preaching, that he would
usually carry his very adversary captive, after the triumphant
chariot of his rhetoric," but "the chariot of his rhetoric ceased
to be triumphant when the master himself ceased to drive it," and
we shall never know the spell of his genius. For one who had shown
himself so uncompromising in action where his own beliefs were
concerned, he was singularly gentle and humble. Followed from his
church one day, by a specially sour and peevish fanatic, who
announced to him with a frown that his ministry had become dark
and flat, he replied:

"Both, brother--it may be both; let me have your prayers that it
may be otherwise."

Such a nature would never revolt against the system of spiritual
cross-questioning that belonged to every church, and it is easy to
see how his hold on his congregation was never lost, even at the
stormiest episode in his New England career.

The people flocked to hear him, and until the removal to Ipswich,
there is no doubt that Anne Bradstreet and her husband met him
often, and that he