EARLY COLONIAL LITERATURE. 1607-1700 I. The English in Virginia. II. Pilgrims and Puritans in New England. III. The New England Clergy. IV. Puritan Poetry in New England. I. THE ENGLISH IN VIRGINIA: CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH, WILLIAM STRACHEY, GEORGE SANDYS. THE story of a nation's literature ordinarily has its beginning far back in the remoter history of that nation, obscured by the uncertainties of an age of which no trustworthy records have been preserved. The earliest writings of a people are usually the first efforts at literary production of a race in its childhood; and as these compositions develop they record the intellectual and artistic growth of the race. The conditions which attended the development of literature in America, therefore, are peculiar. At the very time when Sir Walter Raleigh -- a type of the great and splendid men of action who made such glorious history for England in the days of Elizabeth -- was organizing the first futile efforts to colonize the new world, English Literature, which is the joint possession of the whole English-speaking race, was rapidly developing. Sir Philip Sidney had written his Arcadia, first of the great prose romances, and enriched English poetry with his sonnets; Edmund Spenser had composed The Shepherd's Calendar; Christopher Marlowe had established the drama upon heroic lines; and Shakespeare had just entered on the first flights of his fancy. When, in 1606, King James granted to a company of London merchants the first charter of Virginia, Sidney and Spenser and Marlowe were dead, Shakespeare had produced some of his greatest plays, the name of Ben Jonson, along with other notable names, had been added to the list of our great dramatists, and the philosopher, Francis Bacon, had published the first of his essays. These are the familiar names which represent the climax of literary achievement in the Elizabethan age; and this brilliant epoch had reached its full height when the first permanent English settlement in America was made at Jamestown in 1607. On New Year's day, the little fleet commanded by Captain Newport sailed forth on its venturesome and romantic enterprise, the significance of which was not altogether unsuspected by those who saw it depart. Michael Drayton, one of the most popular poets of his day, later poet laureate of the kingdom, sang in quaint, prophetic verses a cheery farewell: -- "You brave heroic minds, Worthy your country's name, That honor still pursue, Go and subdue, Whilst loitering hinds Lurk here at home with shame. "And in regions farre, Such heroes bring ye forth As those from whom we came; And plant our name Under that star Not known unto our north. "And as there plenty grows Of laurel everywhere, Apollo's sacred tree, You it may see, A poet's brows To crown, that may sing there." The Virginia Colony. This little band of adventurers "in regions farre" disembarked from the ships Discovery, Good Speed, and Susan Constant upon the site of a town yet to be built, fifty miles inland, on the shore of a stream as yet unexplored, in the heart of a vast green wilderness the home of savage tribes who were none too friendly. It was hardly to be expected that the ripe seeds of literary culture should be found in such a company, or should germinate under such conditions in any notable luxuriance. The surprising fact, however, is that in this group of gentlemen adventurers there was one man of some literary craft, who, while leading the most strenuous life of all, efficiently protecting and heartening his less courageous comrades in all manner of perilous experiences, compiled and wrote with much literary skill the picturesque chronicles of the settlement. John Smith, 1580-1631. Captain John Smith, the mainstay of the Jamestown colony in the critical period of its early existence, was a true soldier of fortune, venturesome, resolute, self-reliant, resourceful; withal a man of great good sense, and with the grasp on circumstances which belongs to the man of power. His life since leaving his home on a Lincolnshire farm at sixteen years of age, had been replete with romantic adventure. He had been a soldier in the French army and had served in that of Holland. He had wandered through Italy and Greece into the countries of eastern Europe, and had lived for a year in Turkey and Tartary. He had been in Russia, in Germany, in Spain, and in Africa, and was familiar with the islands of the Mediterranean and those of the eastern Atlantic. Smith afterward wrote a narrative of his singularly full and adventurous life, not sparing, apparently, the embellishment which in his time seems to have been reckoned a natural feature of narrative art. The honesty of his statements has been doubted, perhaps to the point of injustice; and at the present time a reaction is to be seen which presents the writings of the sturdy old adventurer in a more favorable light.1 It was natural enough that such a daring rover should catch the spirit of enthusiasm with which the exploration and settlement of the New World had inflamed Englishmen of his time and type. And it was a recognition of his experience and practical sagacity which led to his appointment as a member of the Council at the head of affairs in the Jamestown colony. The True Relation. In so far as the literary accomplishments of Captain John Smith have any immediate connection with American history, our interest centres upon his True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony, which is now resident in the South part thereof, till the last returne from thence (London, 1608). Smith's writings are plain, blunt narratives, which please by their rough vigor and the breezy picturesqueness of his rugged, unaffected style. Hardly to be accounted literature except by way of compliment, the True Relation is not unworthy of its place in our literary record as the first English book produced in America. It supplies our earliest chronicle of the perils and hardships of our American pioneers. The romantic story of Pocahontas is found in its pages, briefly recounted by the writer in terms which hardly warrant its dismissal as a myth; and many another thrilling incident of that distressing struggle with the wilderness which makes a genuine appeal to the reader now, as it undoubtedly did to the kinsmen of the colonists in England for whom the book was originally prepared. Other writings. Smith was the author of several other narrative and descriptive pamphlets in which he recounted the early history of the colonies at Plymouth and on Massachusetts Bay. Indeed, it was the redoubtable Captain who first gave to that part of the country the name New England; and to the little harbor on Cape Cod, before the coming of the Puritans, Smith had already given the name of Plymouth. In 1624, he published A General History of Virginia, a compilation edited in England from the reports of various writers. William Strachey, fl. 1609-1618. Another interesting chronicle of this perilous time was written in the summer of 1610 by a gentleman recently arrived at Jamestown after a stormy and eventful voyage. This vivid narrative, called A true Reportory of the wracke and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, knight, upon and from the ilands of the Bermudas, his coming to Virginia, and the estate of that colony, was written by William Strachey, of whose personality little is known. The tremendous picture of shipwreck and disaster is presented in a masterly style. "The clouds gathering thick upon us, and the winds singing and whistling most unusually, . . . a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow from out the Northeast, which swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from heaven, which like an hell of darkness, turned black upon us. . . . "Prayers might well be in the heart and lips, but drowned in the outcries of the Officers, -- nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope. . . . "The sea swelled above the Clouds and gave battle unto heaven. "Sir George Summers being upon the watch, had an apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height from the mainmast, and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle as it were upon any of the four shrouds, and for three or four hours together, or rather more, half the night it kept with us, running sometimes along the mainyard to the very end, and then returning. . . . "It being now Friday, the fourth morning, it wanted little but that there had been a general determination to have shut up hatches and commending our sinful souls to God, committed the ship to the mercy of the sea." No wonder that when Strachey's little book, printed in London, fell into the hands of William Shakespeare, this dramatic recital of the furious storm which drove the Virginia fleet on the reefs of "the still vexed Bermoothes" should have inspired the poet in his description of the tempest evoked by Prospero on his enchanted island.1 So other narratives were written and other chronicles compiled by these industrious Jamestown settlers; but their chronicles and reports were largely official documents prepared for the guidance of the company's officers in London, and for the general enlightenment of Englishmen at home. Nowhere among them do we find the ring of that resounding style which makes literature of Strachey's prose. George Sandys, 1578-1644. It did not seem likely that thus early in Virginia history any laurels would be gathered from Apollo's sacred tree to crown a poet's brow -- as Drayton had pleasantly predicted in his lines of farewell. Yet, after all, among these gentlemen adventurers who continued to come from England in increasing numbers, there arrived in 1621, as treasurer of the Virginia company, one who was recognized as a poet of considerable rank -- George Sandys, author of an excellent metrical translation of the first five books of Ovid. To Sandys also, Drayton, now laureate, had imparted a professional benediction, exhorting his friend with appreciative words: -- "Let see what lines Virginia will produce. Go on with Ovid. . . . Entice the muses thither to repair; Entreat them gently; train them to that air." And amid the exacting duties of his position in a most discouraging time, in experiences of privation and distress, amid the terrors of Indian uprising and massacre, he "went on" with Ovid. After four years of strenuous life in the new America, Sandys went home to England with his translation of the Metamorphoses completed, and in 1626 presented his finished work to the king. It was a notable poem, was so accepted by contemporaries, and afterward elicited the admiration of Dryden and of Pope. Thus came the first expression of the poetic art in the New World -- "the first utterance of the conscious literary spirit, articulated in America."1 We record with interest these few literary appearances in the annals of our early history, but we can in no sense claim these writers as representatives of our native American literature. Smith, Strachey, and Sandys were Englishmen temporarily interested in a great scheme of colonization. After brief sojourn in the colony, they returned to England. They were not colonists; they were travelers; and while their compositions have a peculiar interest, and are not without significance for us, they cannot be accounted American works. Development of the Colony. The record of Virginia's early struggles, its difficulties with the Indians, its depletion by illness and famine, its losses due to the incapacity of leaders and policies ill adapted to the conditions of a true colonial life, its reinforcements, its acquisition of colonists, its advancement in wealth and importance, -- this is familiar history. The remarkable fact is the rapidity with which the colony developed. In 1619, twelve hundred settlers arrived; along with them were sent one hundred convicts to become servants. Boys and girls, picked up in the London streets, were shipped to Virginia to be bound during their minority to the planters. In the same year a Dutch man-of-war landed twenty negroes at Jamestown, who were sold as slaves -- the first in America. The cultivation of tobacco became profitable, the plantations were extended, and new colonists were brought over in large numbers. Following the execution of Charles I, and the establishment of the Puritan Protectorate, hundreds of the exiled Cavaliers migrated to Virginia with their families and traditions. These new colonists stamped the character of the dominion that was to be. The best blood of England was thus infused into the new enterprise, and the spirit of the South was determined. In 1650, the population of Virginia was 15,000; twenty years later, it was 40,000. Yet the southern soil did not prove favorable to literary growth. English books were, of course, brought into the colony, and private libraries were to be found here and there in the homes of the wealthy. There were no free schools in Virginia, and but few private schools. The children of the planters received instruction under tutors in their own homes, of were sent to England for their education. For fear of seditious literature, printing-presses were forbidden by the king. In 1671, Governor Berkeley declared: -- Literary Conditions. "I thank God there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best of governments. God keep us from both."1 "Leah and Rachel." Of original literary accomplishment, there was little or no thought until well on in the eighteenth century. Two or three vigorous pamphlets, published in England not long after 1650, are interesting as voicing the first decided utterances of a genuine American spirit in the southern settlements. John Hammond, a resident in the newer colony of Maryland, visiting his old home in 1656, became homesick for the one he had left in America. "It is not long since I came from thence," he said, "nor do I intend, by God's assistance, to be long out of it again. . . . It is that country in which I desire to spend the remnant of my days, in which I covet to make my grave," His little work, entitled Leach and Rachel ("the two fruitful sisters, Virginia and Maryland"), was written with a purpose to show what boundless opportunity was afforded in these two colonies to those who in England had no opportunity at all. New England II. PILGRIMS AND PURITANS IN NEW ENGLAND; HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE WRITERS: WILLIAM BRADFORD, JOHN WINTHROP, FRANCIS HIGGINSON, WILLIAM WOOD, THOMAS MORTON. New England. In the northern settlements, conditions socially and intellectually were very different from those existing in the South. The men who colonized New England represented a unique type; their ideals, their purpose, were essentially other than those which inspired the settlers at Jamestown and the later colonizers of Virginia. The band of Pilgrims who landed from the Mayflower at Plymouth in December, 1620, were not bent on mere commercial adventure, lured to the shores of the New World by tales of its fabulous wealth. They were not in search of gold; they were looking for a permanent home, and had brought their wives and children with them. Their ideals were of the most serious sort; their deep religious feeling colored all their plans and habits of life. The Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were a congregation of l"Separatists" or non-conformists who had already endured hardness for conscience' sake before they had ever left the old home. Under the leadership of the Rev. John Robinson and Elder William Brewster, they had fled to Holland in 1608. For ten years, this community of Englishmen had lived peacefully in the Dutch city of Leyden, earning their own living and enjoying the religious liberty they craved; but they felt themselves aliens in a foreign land, and saw that their children were destined to lose their English birthright. After long deliberation, they determined "as pilgrims" to seek in the new continent a home where they might still possess their cherished freedom of worship, while living under English laws and following the customs and traditions of their mother-land. The plymouth colony. This company of men obtained a grant from the London Company under the sane charter as that which had been given to the Virginia Colony. They finally set sail from Plymouth, in England, September 16, 1620. It was in the early winter when the Mayflower sighted the shores of Cape Cod. The story of "New England's trails," first told in the narrative of Captain John Smith,1 is as romantic as that of the Jamestown Colony and even more impressive. Of the forty-one adult males who signed the famous compact on board the Mayflower, only twelve bore the title of "Gentlemen." They were a sober-minded, sturdy band of true colonizers, familiar with labor and inspired with the conviction that God was leading them in their difficult way. Although half the colony perished in the rigor of that first winter, for which they had been wholly unprepared, the spirit of the Pilgrims spoke in the remarkable words of their leader, Brewster: -- "It is not with us as with men whom small things can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again."2 Puritan Colonies in New England. The companies of settlers who followed the Pilgrims within the next few years were composed of the same sturdy, independent class of thoughtful, high-minded men. They were Puritans, -- for the most part well-to-do, prosperous people; many of them had been educated in the universities, and brought the reverence for education with them. "If God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that thy mother ever asked for thee," said a Puritan matron to her son. The colonists who within the next fifty years dotted the New England coast-line with their thrifty settlements were idealists. As Professor Tyler puts it, they established "not an agricultural community, nor a manufacturing community, nor a trading community; it was a thinking community." Moral earnestness characterized every action. In 1636, the General Court of Massachusetts voted to establish a college at Newtown; John Harvard, dying two years later, bequeathed his library and half his estate to the school, which was then named Harvard College in his honor. In 1639, the first printing-press in America was set up at Cambridge, as Newtown was then named out of compliment to the numerous graduates of the English university, then settled in this vicinity. The colonists had their grammar schools which prepared for college; and by 1650 public instruction was compulsory in four of the Five New England colonies, Rhode Island being the exception. The earliest literary efforts among the New England colonists -- like the beginnings in Virginia -- were historical land narrative writings, some in the form of journals, a few, more ambitious, representing real attempts at formal history. William Bradford, 1590-1657. William Bradford, for whom the title Father of American history may well be claimed, was a native of Yorkshire, and at seventeen, a member of the Rev. John Robinson's famous congregation, fled with his brethren into Holland. He was prominent among the Pilgrims at the time of their arrival in America, and att thirty-two was elected governor of Plymouth. Until his death, he continued to fill this honorable office, except as he was permitted to break the period of his service for intervals at five several times. Bradford was a plain, sensible, truthful man, an able leader under severe conditions. He felt the immense significance of what was then taking place, and sought to provide a record which should preserve a faithful picture of the settlement. No sooner had the Mayflower sighted land, than Bradford began conjointly with Edward Winslow to keep a journal of all occurrences. This journal was carefully continued to the end of the first year. Ten years after the arrival, Governor Bradford began his notable History of the Plimoth Plantation, on which he labored for twenty years. His purpose, as he avowed, was to write "in a plain style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things." His story goes back to the persecutions in England and details the causes of the flight into Holland; describes the sojourn there, and explains the reasons for the second exodus to the shores of the New World. What follows consists of a contemporaneous narrative of the experiences of the colony, set down in simple chronicle without much regard to proportion or unity; but the unmistakable touch of his own homely, honest personality and the vigor of his blunt, realistic style impart a distinct literary flavor to this primitive history of Plymouth, which adds too its obvious value as the first de tailed report of the New England settlements. An illustration is found in the writer's account of the Pilgrims and their perilous situation upon their arrival in the New World: -- "Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element. . . . But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people's present condition; and so I think will the reader too when he well consider the same. Being thus passed the vast ocean and a sea of troubles before, in their preparation, . . . they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor. It is recorded in scripture as mercy to the apostle and his shipwrecked company, that the barbarians showed them no small kindness in refreshing them ; but these savage barbarians when they met with them . . . were readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise. And for the season, it was winter; and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? And what multitudes there might be of them, they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things stared upon them with a weather-beaten face; and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world. . . . May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say : `Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord and he heard their voice and looked on their adversity. Let them therefore praise the Lord because he is good and his mercies endure for over.'" The manuscript of Bradford's history has itself had a rather interesting story. At the death of its author, it fell to the possession of his nephew, Edward Morton, who made liberal use of it in his own New England's Memorial (1669). It then came into the hands of Rev. Thomas Prince, who wrote a Chronological History of New England (1736). During the occupation of Boston by the British troops in 1775-76, the manuscript was lost with many other valuable documents preserved in Prince's library, which was in the tower of the Old South Church. In 1855, this valuable document was discovered in the library of the Bishop of London, was copied, and published in this country; and in 1897, the original itself was restored to America. It is kept in the Massachusetts State Library at the State House in Boston. John Winthrop, 1588-1649. Among the company of English Puritans who, in 1630, settled on the shore of Massachusetts Bay, the foremost figure was that of John Winthrop, already appointed Governor of the colony. His family was well known in his home shire of Suffolk, a family of property and position. Winthrop himself was a man of noble character, a conscientious Puritan, yet catholic in spirit beyond some of his associates, possessing the tastes and accomplishments of culture. During his voyage to America, he had busied himself in the composition of a little treatise which was characteristic of this broad-minded man. A Model of Christian Charity is the title of his essay; and in it he presents a plea for the exercise of an unselfish spirit on the part of all the members of this devoted band, now standing on the threshold of an experience which could not but be trying in the extreme on the nerves and temper of all. "We must be knit together in this work as one man!" was his cry. History of New England. John Winthrop History of New England is the contemporaneous record preserved in his journal of occurrences in the colony observed by him, or reported to him. The busy governor made a brave effort to keep up with the march of events. Notwithstanding the press of official duties, which more than filled his days, he persevered with his journal, which commences with the beginning of the voyage and comes down to a date only some few weeks previous to his death, in 1649. There are gaps in the chronicle and a significant brevity in the records of particular incidents, some of these records passing from the trivial to the pathetic with ludicrous conciseness. "A cow died at Plymouth, and a goat at Boston, with eating Indian corn." The fact is recorded as faithfully as a previous item, mentioned with Spartan brevity: "My son, Henry Winthrop, was drowned at Salem." In the following passage, we get a curious glimpse into the Puritan mind. The pathos of the original note is almost lost in the unconscious humor of the historian's wise deductions: -- "Mr. Hopkins, the governor of Hartford upon Connecticut, came to Boston, and brought his wife with him (a godly young woman, and of special parts), who was fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years, by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books. Her husband, being very loving and tender of her, was loath to grieve her; but he saw his error, when it was too late. For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved t them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her. "He brought her to Boston, and left her with her brother, one Mr. Yale, a merchant, to try what means might be had here for her. But no help could be had." There are more momentous records than these in the annals, and Winthrop's history shares with that of Bradford in interest and importance. Significance of the Chronicles. Through these straightforward, plain-spoken men we get our clearest vision of the rugged, hazardous pioneer life, its heroism, its fortitude,its romance, its curiously contradictory display of self-sacrificing sympathy and fanatical intolerance ; its superstition and narrowness ; its petty trails and large tribulations ; its splendid faith, its aggressive energy of zeal. It is well for the student of literature, as for the student of history, to feel the spirit of these early New England histories. Just as the Virginia settlers developed on the fertile plantations of the South a civilization which reflected the aristocratic traditions of the Cavaliers, so on the rock-bound coasts of Massachusetts Bay these northern colonists stamped their descendants with the grave, stern, persistent type of Puritan character. Early Descriptive Writers. There were not wanting in the colony those who found delight in studying and describing the natural wonders of this new land. The impressive grandeur of the forest, the fertility of the virgin soil, nature's luxuriant abundance redeemed from the wilderness, the strange picturesqueness of the savage natives, the wild things of the woods -- so much that was new and wonderful in their environment -- all this made its appeal to the imagination of some among these hard-headed, practical pioneers. Such an one was Rev. Francis Higginson (1567-1630), a gifted and eloquent man, who came from England in 1629 to serve the community at Salem as its minister. It was in June that the voyagers landed, and the glories of a New England summer colored the impressions of the newly arrived clergyman with a primeval splendor. He had written a narrative of his voyage, and now he began a description of the country itself. His little book of observations is a bright and genial picture, poetically framed. Under the title New England's Plantation, it was published in London in 1630. "A sup of New England's air is better than a whole draught of Old England's ale," declares its author. The woods, the flowers, the plants, delighted him. "Here are also abundance of other sweet herbs," he wrote, "delightful to the smell, whose names I know not, and plenty of single damask roses, very sweet." Even the stern rigidity of the Puritan could bend above the beauty of the sweetbriar and gratefully inhale its fragrance. The chill breath of the New England winter does not blight his enthusiasm. The great hearth-fires in the cabins, and the inexhaustible supply of wood to feed the flames rejoice his heart. "There is good living for those who love good fires!" he exclaims. William Wood. Something of a naturalist was William Wood, who published in 1634 his New England's Prospect, an interesting description of the country in which he had made his home. A little of a poet, also, he enlivened his account by putting some of his observations into verse -- as, for example:-- "The beasts be as followeth: "The kingly Lion and the strong-armed Bear, The large-limbed Mooses, with the tripping Deer; Quill- darting Porcupines and Raccoons be Castled in the hollow of an aged tree; The skipping Squirrel, Rabbit, purblind Hare, Immurëd in the self-same castle are. "Concerning lions I will not say that I ever saw any myself, but some affirm that they have seen a lion at Cape Ann, which is not above six leagues from Boston; some likewise being lost in woods have heard such terrible roarings as have made them much aghast: which must either be devils or lions; there being no other creatures which use to roar saving bears, which have not such a terrible kind of roaring." Merrymount. No record of early New England life can fail to take account of the experiences of Thomas Morton, a royalist who, in 1626, established himself with some thirty boon companions on an estate1 not far from the Plymouth settlement. The presence of this lively neighbor proved anything but agreeable to the strict and godly residents of Plymouth and of Boston, who were scandalized by the goings-on at Merrymount. Here were sports and revelings which were viewed by the Puritans with consternation, and then withrighteous indignation. When Morton's little company had increased to a considerable number, -- for various congenial spirits had been added to the group, -- these stern moralists rose in their wrath, hewed down with axe and sword the lofty maypole around which their rollicking neighbors had rehearsed the dances and revels of Merry England, and banished Morton which his followers from the country. Back in his native land, he wrote his New English Canaan (1637), turning the shafts of ridicule upon his victorious enemies. While the work in itself is of slight importance, the incident is a diverting one, and gives a humorous glow to the sober-hued picture of this sombre Puritan age. The New England Clergy III. THE NEW ENGLAND CLERGY: THOMAS HOOKER, THOMAS SHEPARD, JOHN COTTON, NATHANIEL WARD, ROGER WILLIAMS, JOHN ELIOT, THE MATHERS. Theology in New England. Among a people constituted in temper like the Puritans, a people with whom religion was life and whose life even on its temporal side was closely identified with religion, it was natural that religious ideas should find constant expression in literature. This we have seen to be true in the historical narratives of Bradford and Winthrop. The Puritan writers are always impressed with the spiritual significance of their conquest in this new Canaan. Even the most casual accidents of pioneer experience are interpreted as filled with divine purpose. John Winthrop soberly records the fact that in his son's library of a thousand volumes, one, which contained the Greek Testament, the Psalms, and the Book of Common Prayer bound up together, was found injured by mice. Every leaf of the Common Prayer was eaten through; not a leaf of the other portions was touched, nor one of the other volumes injured. A marvelous providence this, clear enough in its indications. So Edward Johnson, not an educated man, but a farmer and a ship carpenter, who had been active in the founding of Woburn, in 1640, wrote his Wonder-Working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England (1654). "For the Lord Christ intends to achieve greater matters by this little handful than the world is aware of." The colonists are soldiers under the divine leader; they must not tolerate the existence among them of a single disbeliever; they must take up their arms and march manfully on till all opposers of Christ's kingly power be abolished. Thus spake Puritanism on the side of its austerity and fanaticism. The Clergy. There was in New England one class of men who by natural aptitude and by training were well fitted to be heard from on religious topics. These were the ministers. As the village church, or meeting-house, was the centre geographically, morally, and socially, of every New England community, so the minister was, usually, the dominating force among his townspeople, maintaining the high dignity of the sacred calling with a manner which commanded a deference amounting to awe. Not only was his authority recognized on the purely religious questions of daily life, not only was his voice reverently heard as he preached for hours from the high pulpit on Sunday, but the New England minister was the natural leader of his flock in every field. He gave counsel in town affairs, he directed the political policy of his people. In cases of disagreement, the minister was usually the mediator and the final court of appeal. The greater part of the New England ministry were educated men of noteworthy gifts. The majority were graduates of the English universities; many of them had been distinguished for their eloquence and piety before the religious persecution of Charles and his ministers had driven them forth to find religious liberty elsewhere. Three strong thinkers and eloquent preachers are usually mentioned as conspicuous among these early colonial ministers: Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton. All three were graduates of the same college at Cambridge; all were Puritan preachers in England until compelled to flee for their lives because of the hostility of Bishop Laud. Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647. Hooker had escaped into Holland, and in 1633 followed in the track of those who had crossed the ocean before him. He became the minister at Cambridge. Three years later he led a colony of one hundred families through the wilderness into the beautiful Connecticut valley and founded the town of Hartford (1636). Here until his death, in 1647, Hooker wrote and preached and moulded the life of his parish. His power in the pulpit is said to have been wonderful. Many of his sermons were published; he wrote numerous treatises on theological and spiritual themes. It is significant of the impression left by Hooker on his contemporaries that an English clergyman affirmed that "to praise the writings of Hooker would be to lay paint upon burnished marble, or add light unto the sun." Thomas Shepard, 1605-49. Rev. Thomas Shepard arrived in America in 1635, succeeding Hooker in Cambridge, where he preached until his death in 1649. Unlike the stalwart Hooker, whose physical strength and bodily energy matched his intellectual stature, Shepard was an invalid. He was, however, a profound scholar, and a "soul-melting preacher." His writings are not voluminous, but they exercised a strong influence even after his death. His diction is imaginative and forceful, with the rugged force of Puritan vigor. "God heweth thee by sermons, sicknesses, losses and crosses, sudden death, mercies and miseries, yet nothing makes thee better. "Death cometh hissing . . . like a fiery dragon with the sting of vengeance in the mouth of it. Then shall God surrender up thy forsaken soul into the hands of devils, who being thy jailers, must keep thee till the great day of account; so that as they friends are scrambling for thy goods, and worms for thy body, so devils shall scramble for thy soul." John Cotton, 1585-1652. On the same ship which brought Thomas Hooker to America came John Cotton, most noted of these three men. For nearly twenty years, he had served the parish of St. Botolph's in Boston in Lincolnshire, and was known far and wide for his aggressive spirituality. In 1633, he discovered that he was no longer safe in his native land. The principal colony on Massachusetts Bay had longed for him. In compliment to him, its members adopted the name of Boston; and John Cotton became the foremost minister in New England, -- "a most universal scholar, a living system of the liberal arts, and a walking library," as his grandson, Cotton Mather, described him. John Cotton wrote many theological treatises, and engaged in bitter controversies. He was a laborious student. Near him as he studied stood a sand-glass which would run four hours. This glass, thrice turned, was the measure of his day's work. This he called "a scholar's day." His writings lack the picturesque imagery of Hooker and Shepard. His style is lifeless now, but he carried prodigious weight among his contemporaries and was the foremost champion in the theological battles of his age. The Simple Cobler. Among the more noteworthy publications of these scholastic writers was a singular book which appeared in London in 1647. Its author was Nathaniel Ward, a Cambridge graduate and retired minister, who lived at what is now the town of Ipswich in eastern Massachusetts. His work is quaintly addressed under the title of The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America. Upon the title-page, in accordance with seventeenth-century custom, the author explains his purpose at considerable length: as -- "willing to help mend his native country, lamentably tattered both in the upper-leather and sole, with all the honest stitches he can take; and as willing never to be paid for his work by old English wonted pay. It is his trade to patch all the year long gratis. Therefore I pray gentlemen keep your purses. By Theodore de la Guard." This picturesque book, full of pungent wit, directs its satire at what its author deemed the follies and perversions of his day. The allegory of the Cobbler is not maintained much beyond the title-page. Himself a refugee from religious persecution, he expresses the usual Puritan intolerance of all independent opinion: "That state that will give liberty of conscience in matters of religion must give liberty of conscience and conversation in their moral laws, or else the fiddle will be out of tune, and some of the strings crack." Roger Williams, 1606-83. Nathaniel Ward's Simple Cobler voices with characteristic fervor the utterance of Puritan bigotry; but there was in the colony one powerful champion of religious tolerance who constitutes one of its most attractive figures. This was Roger Williams, an independent among the independents. Born in Wales, a university man and a clergyman in the Church of England, he had turned nonconformist, and appeared in Plymouth colony in the usual way. In 1633, two years after his arrival at Plymouth, Williams went to Salem to be the minister there; but his teachings were altogether too radical to suit his stern and narrow- minded Puritan brethren. He preached a real liberty of thought and worship -- even for Baptists and Quakers; taught that it was unrighteous to rob the Indian of his land, and to treat captives with cruelty; and maintained that the State's authority did not extend over the individual conscience or opinion. Roger Williams was one of those who proclaim the truth so far in advance of the conceptions held by those about them, that they seem to be living years before their proper time. He was banished from Massachusetts in 1636; and making friends with the Pequot Indians, he planted on Narragansett Bay the settlement of Providence. Williams revisited England several times, and was no inconspicuous figure there. He knew Milton and had the friendship of Cromwell. It was on one of these visits that he wrote his first important treatise on "Soul Liberty," -- The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. This was published at London in 1644, the year in which Milton's Areopagitica, a plea for the freedom of the press, appeared. Williams's Bloody Tenet was the beginning of a famous literary battle between himself and that belligerent Puritan defender, John Cotton, who in 1647 published his reply in The Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb. The final rejoinder came from Roger Williams in The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's Endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb. And with this brief summary of the encounter between these two keen-minded, argument-loving minds, their blows delivered in what Williams called "sharp Scripture language," we may well afford to take our leave of Puritan controversy. John Eliot, 1604-90. The attitude of the Englishman toward the native inhabitants of America1 has long been marked with injustice and dishonor. The precarious situation of the colonists surrounded by fierce and savage tribes naturally produced occasion for the display of savage passions on the part of the white man as well as on that of the Indian. The horrors of war and massacre that redden the early annals of colonial history were, no doubt, due in part to the indiscretions and encroachments of the superior race. Some one has said of the Puritan pioneers that "first they fell upon their knees, and then they fell on the aborigines." As we have seen, Roger Williams declared boldly for a different policy; and his own methods with the savage peoples were well illustrated in the comparative peace and prosperity of his settlement in Rhode Island. Another peacemaker is discovered in the gentle personality of John Eliot, the "Apostle to the Indians," who came to Boston in 1631, and devoted his life to the conversion of these children of the forest, whom he regarded as descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. He studied their native tongue, preached to them, converted many, and organized his converts in little churches of their own. He wrote several books of minor importance; but he is to be remembered as a translator of the entire Bible into the Algonquin tongue. It was a tremendous task and a remarkable achievement. He published the New Testament in 1661 and the Old Testament in 1663. It was the first Bible in any language, printed in British America. This translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular of a people who had no written language, done largely by candle-light after days devoted to exacting work in his Roxbury parish, is a most remarkable monument to "Apostle" Eliot's laborious industry and his missionary zeal. The Mathers: a distinguished Family. The scholarly attainments of colonial Puritanism have been amply shown by this record of the New England ministry in the literature of the time. The history of a single family furnishes our most conspicuous and most curiously interesting illustration of scholastic eminence and its position in popular regard. Through three generations the Mathers -- in grandfather, son, and grandson -- appear as brilliant intellectual leaders of the Massachusetts clergy. Richard Mather, 1596-1669. The first of the "dynasty," Richard Mather, an Oxford graduate, who arrived in Boston in 1635, was one of that conscientious Puritan brotherhood that of necessity sought a refuge and a field for spiritual conquest in the New World. He became the minister at Dorchester. "My brother Mather is a mighty man," Thomas Hooker said of him. Although he was a prolific writer, it is sufficient here to recall the fact that Richard Mather's name was the one appended to the preface of the old Bay Psalm Book. (Cotton and Increase Mather, which are being skipped, would go here) Puritan Poetry in New England IV. PURITAN POETRY IN NEW ENGLAND: BAY PSALM BOOK, ANNE BRADSTREET, MICHAEL WIGGLESWORTH. Early Puritan Poetry. The Puritans were not susceptible to the charms of poetry. The strenuous life of the pioneer left little time for cultivating any of the arts, and the spirit of New England was too serious and too stern to permit indulgence in what was merely pleasant or beautiful. Even after the first critical years of danger and struggle were past, the intellectual life of the people was bounded by the narrow limits of religious discussion and theological debate. That the Puritan was not without imagination, however, is abundantly proved by the forceful figures and impassioned rhetoric of the prose writers whom we have been considering. Moreover, some of these same men did occasionally slip into rhyme. William Wood has been quoted.1 Even John Cotton was the author of verses, halting and rough-hewn, and full of the queer conceits which were common at the time. It is significant that this pious man wrote much of his verse in the pages of the household almanac, where it remained hidden from the public eye; and sometimes he disguised its metrical character by inscribing it in Greek. Much ingenuity was expended upon epitaphs and obituary tributes -- so solemn a theme as that of death justifying poetical expression. If there were any opportunity to play upon the name of the deceased, the opportunity was gracefully seized. When the Rev. Samuel Stone, the successor of Thomas Hooker at Hartford, died in 1663, his colleagues vied with one another in their fervid appreciations of his virtues. He was compared to the stone which Jacob set up and called Ebenezer, and also to the stone with which David slew Goliath; he was termed "Whetstone, that edgefy'd th' obtusest mind: Loadstone, that drew the iron heart unkind." -- and this within the compass of a single epitaph. One quotation will serve to show the skill with which these versifiers were sometimes able to conquer the difficulties of rhyme:-- "Here lies the darling of his time, Mitchell expirëd in his prime; Was four years short of forty-seven, Was found full ripe and plucked for heaven."1 The Bay Psalm Book. If poetry be rare among our forefathers, it is nevertheless true that the first English book printed in America passed for poetry with them, and for poetry of an edifying and noble type. The Whole Booke of Psalmes, commonly known as the Bay Psalm Book, was printed on the new press at Cambridge in 1640.2 This work, designed to provide a metrical version of the Psalms of David, to be used in the churches, contains the joint efforts of three New England ministers -- "the chief divines in the country," -- Richard Mather of Dorchester, Thomas Welde, and John Eliot, of Roxbury. The preface, written by Mather, declares that "It hath been one part of our religious care and faithful endeavor to keep close to the original text. . . . If, therefore, the verses are not always so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect, let them consider that God's altar needs not our polishings, for we have respected rather a plain translation than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any paraphrase; and so have attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry." In illustration of the art displayed by these divines in their paraphrase, historians have invariably cited some of the most atrocious of the compositions. This seems hardly fair. The following examples are sufficient to show the average result of "the sad, mechanic exercise" of these godly men:-- "I in the Lord do trust; how then to my soul do ye say, As doth a little bird, unto your mountain fly away? "For lo the wicked bend their bow, their arrows they prepare On string; to shoot in dark at them in heart that upright are." From paraphrase of Psalm xi. "Praise ye the Lord, praise God in's place of holiness; O praise him in the firmament of his great mightiness. O praise him for his acts that be magnificent, "& praise ye him according to his greatness excellent. With trumpet praise ye him that gives a sound so high: & do ye praise him with the Harp & sounding Psalterye." Psalm cl. The student may be sure that he will find many worse compositions in this collection; it is doubtful if he will find smoother. And yet the Bay Psalm Book served its sacred purpose in the New England churches for more than a century; it was even used to some extent by Puritan worshipers in England and Scotland until after 1750. At the Old South Church in Boston, the Bay Psalm Book, although it had been revised, was not displaced until 1786. Anne Bradstreet, 1613-72. From the midst of the crude and sombre compositions of Puritan verse-makers, there arose one writer for whom in some measure the poetical gift may be claimed. This was Anne Bradstreet. In 1650, the first volume of her poems was published in London. Upon the title-page of this volume the author was rather extravagantly introduced as "the Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America." Anne Bradstreet, a really gifted woman, was the daughter of Thomas Dudley, a Puritan soldier and scholar, who has been described as a "typical narrow-minded, straitlaced Calvinist, for whom it is so much easier to entertain respect than affection."1 Nevertheless, Anne Dudley was reared in comfort and enjoyed especially the dear delight of books. She was married at sixteen to Simon Bradstreet, a Puritan gentleman who afterward became a leader in colonial affairs and a governor of Massachusetts. In 1630, the entire family joined the company of emigrants to America, Thomas Dudley holding the position of deputy governor under Winthrop. The Bradstreets settled near the present town of Andover, not far from the beautiful Merrimac. For this young wife, accustomed to an atmosphere of comfort and refinement, the experiences of pioneer life must have been trying in the extreme. Yet, in the wilderness, amid its threatening perils, superintending the work which falls to the mistress of a farm, rearing and educating her eight children, Mrs. Bradstreet found comfort in literary occupation, and both time and spirit to write. The quality of her mind is shown in her prose, but it was as a poet that she found fame. In her verse, she is influenced by the work of such of the English poets as would naturally have impressed her: the devotional poems of John Donne, of Francis Quarles, author of the Divine Emblems; of the Puritan poet, George Wither, and the deeply spiritual poetry of the saintly George Herbert. The verse of these minor English poets who flourished in the time of James and Charles I -- the period of Anne Bradstreet's girlhood and early womanhood -- was characterized by an unusual and fantastic style of thought and diction. These men are sometimes called the "metaphysical poets," because of this artificial quality and on account of their grotesque conceits. The crude rhymes of the colonial epitaphs already quoted, with their incongruous puns, are rather extreme examples of this fantastic style. The work of the "Tenth Muse" shows the influence of this taste for a strained and laborious ingenuity of expression. Her longer works are didactic; so filled with the eager purpose to instruct and edify that the natural Puritan scruples regarding a woman's practice of the literary art were in large degree forgotten. The Four Elements and The Four Seasons are in the form of dialogue, wherein the speakers individually maintain their claims to preëminence; these poems are mechanical and heavy compositions, but show a facility of phrase and rhythm quite new to the readers of colonial verse. The Four Monarchies, her most ambitious poem, is a rhyming chronicle based upon Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World. When Anne Bradstreet's poems were published, in 1650, they were received with extravagant praise in America; and following her death, not a few of her admirers essayed to express their appreciation in flattering verse. John Rogers, who before his death became president of Harvard College, paid his tribute to the genius of Anne Bradstreet in quite exalted utterance. One stanza of his composition may be quoted, in testimony to the effect produced in contemporary minds of literary taste by this gifted woman's work. "Twice have I drunk the nectar of your lines, Which high sublimed my mean-born fantasy. Flushed with these streams of your Maronian wines, Above myself rapt to an ecstasy, Methought I was upon Mount Hybla's top, There where I might those fragrant flowers lop, Whence did sweet odors flow, and honey- spangles drop."1 Let us now read a few stanzas written by Anne Bradstreet herself, taken from her best known and most attractive poem, Contemplations. It was written late in her life, at her home in Andover, and is properly described as "a genuine expression of poetic feeling in the presence of nature." "I heard the merry grasshopper then sing, The black-clad cricket bear a second part, They kept one tune, and played on the same string, Seeming to glory in their little art. Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise? And in their kind resound their maker's praise, Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays? "Under the cooling shadow of a stately Elm, Close state I by a goodly River's side, Where gliding streams the Rocks did overwhelm; A lonely place with pleasures dignifi'd. I once that lov'd the shady woods so well, Now thought the rivers did the trees excel, And if the sun would ever shine there would I dwell. "While musing thus with contemplation fed, And thousand fancies buzzing in my brain, The sweet tongu'd Philomel percht o'er my head, And chanted forth a most melodious strain, Which rapt me so with wonder and delight, I judg'd my hearing better than my sight, And wisht me wings with her awhile to take my flight." A few months before Anne Bradstreet's death, she composed the following lines, which illustrate the aspirations of Puritanism in their noblest form: -- "As weary pilgrim now at rest Hugs with delight his silent nest, His wasted limbs now lie full soft, That miry steps have trodden oft, Pleases himself to think upon His dangers past and travails done; "A pilgrim I, in earth perplexed, With sins, with cares and sorrows vexed, By age and pains brought to decay, And my clay house mouldering away, Oh, how I long to be at rest And soar on high among the blest." Michael Wigglesworth, 1631-1705. While Mrs. Bradstreet's verse at its best exhibits the highest poetical accomplishment of seventeenth- century Puritanism in New England, there was one other Puritan versifier whose inspiration appealed yet more strongly to contemporary minds. This most popular of early American poets was Rev.Michael Wigglesworth, minister at Malden, Massachusetts, author of a tremendous and dismal epic, surcharged with the extreme Calvinism of the time. This masterpiece of Puritan theological belief is entitled The Day of Doom; it was published in 1662, and for a hundred years remained -- as Lowell expresses it -- "the solace of every fireside" in the northern colonies. The Day of Doom. This long and desolate composition is an imaginative account of the Last Judgment. The voice of the trumpet is heard summoning the living and the dead before the dreadful bar. "Some hide themselves in Caves and Delves in places underground. Some rashly leap into the Deep, to scape by being drowned: Some to the Rocks (O senseless blocks!) and woody mountains run That there they might this fearful sight, and dreaded Presence shun." In this jingling ballad measure, so strangely inappropriate to his solemn theme, the reverend author pursues his gloomy way. It is not well to linger over this grotesque presentation of mediaeval art and logic; yet it is through these crude expressions of the early literature that we are brought in closest touch with some phases of the Puritan mind. First we are given the appeals of the condemned; the children argue with reference to Adam's fall: -- "Not we, but he ate of the Tree, whose fruit was interdicted: Yet on us all of his sad Fall, the punishment's inflicted. How could we sin that had not been, or how is his sin our Without consent, which to prevent, we never had a power?" The reply is heard that Adam stood not for himself alone, but for all mankind; that had he done well instead of ill, all would have shared in his benefits -- nor would they have then protested that they deserved not to share therein, on the ground now urged. The inexorable Judge does, however, yield a point in mercy to the children and infants:-- "Yet to compare your sin with their who lived a longer time, I do confess yours is much less, though every sin's a crime. "A crime it is, therefore in bliss you may not hope to dwell; But unto you I shall allow the easiest room in Hell. The glorious King thus answering, they cease and plead no longer: Their consciences must needs confess his reasons are the stronger." Much of Wigglesworth's vision is too lurid to be described here; such raw strength as he applied in painting the details of his fiery picture but intensifies the horror of it and increases our wonder that such conceptions could have prevailed. Puritan Types. It is interesting to remember that at the very time when the Malden minister was writing his Day of Doom, John Milton was engaged upon the real epic of Puritan faith, one of the masterpieces of all literature. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. It was but a decade thereafter that John Bunyan completed his beautiful religious allegory, Pilgrim's Progress. But the Puritanism of New England -- its narrowness and hardness no doubt intensified by the isolation and, perhaps, the depression incident to life in a comparatively rude and struggling colony -- was represented by the zealot, Michael Wigglesworth, with his sing-song verse, and the stern ascetic Cotton Mather, with his laborious and often fantastic prose. It was eminently fitting that when Wigglesworth died in 1705, the author of the Magnalia should have preached his funeral sermon. The two stand appropriately together. They taught the same doctrine; and in their two great representative works they exhibit the literary attainment of Colonial America in the seventeenth century. Suggestions for Reading. The following books will be found especially helpful for reference and for supplementary reading: John Fiske's Old Virginia and her Neighbours; Beginnings of New England; George P. Fisher's The Colonial Era (American History Series); R.G. Thwaites's The Colonies (Epochs of American History). The one authoritative work on early American literature is Moses Coit Tyler's monumental History of American Literature during Colonial Times (2 vols.); for teachers and advanced students of the subject Professor Tyler's books are invaluable. In Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature are to be found extended selections from the works of all these early writers; this excellent Library should be in every school, and in constant use for illustration during the course. The series of Old South Leaflets (published by the Old South Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts) contains reprints of various papers of interest, notably: A Description of New England, by John Smith (No. 121). Manners and Customs of the Indians (from the New English Canaan), by Thomas Morton (No. 87). The Lives of Bradford and Winthrop, by Cotton Mather (No. 77). Bradford's Memoir of Brewster (No. 48). Roger Williams' Letters to Winthrop (No. 54). Bradford's History of the Plimoth Plantation, with a report of the proceedings incident to the return of the manuscript to Massachusetts, was printed and published by the State at Boston, in 1901. The lives and times of Francis Higginson, Anne Bradstreet, and Cotton Mather have been presented in recent interesting biographies. The Scarlet Letter, by Hawthorne, F.J. Stimson's King Noanett, Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold, with other standard works of fiction dealing with this colonial period, may be read with great advantage also.