Anne Bradstreet and Her Time Part 9

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

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

"With dismal chains, and strongest reins Like prisoners of h.e.l.l, They're held in place before Christ's face, Till he their doom shall tell.

These void of tears, but filled with fears, And dreadful expectation Of endless pains and scalding flames, Stand waiting for d.a.m.nation."

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

"Then to the bar all they drew near Who died in infancy, And never had, or good or bad, Effected personally.

But from the womb unto the tomb Were straightway carried, Or, at the least, ere they transgressed-- Who thus began to plead."

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

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

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

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

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

"Then might you hear them rend and tear The air with their outcries; The hideous noise of their sad voice, Ascendeth to the skies.

They wring their hands, their cartiff-hands, And gnash their teeth for terror; They cry, they roar, for anguish sore, And gnaw their tongue for horror.

But get away without delay; Christ pities not your cry; Depart to h.e.l.l, there may you yell And roar eternally.

"Die fain they would, if die they could, But death will not be had; G.o.d's direful wrath their bodies hath Forever immortal made.

They live to lie in misery And bear eternal woe; And live they must whilst G.o.d is just That he may plague them so."

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII.

SOME PHASES OF EARLY COLONIAL LIFE.

Much of the depression evident in Anne Bradstreet's earlier verses came from the circ.u.mstances of her family life. No woman could have been less fitted to bear absence from those nearest to her, and though her adhesive nature had made her take as deep root in Ipswich, as if further change could not come, she welcomed anything that diminished the long separations, and made her husband's life center more at home. One solace seems to have been always open to her, her longest poem, the "Four Monarchies,"

showing her devotion to Ancient history and the thoroughness with which she had made it her own. Anatomy seems to have been studied also, the "Four Humours in Man's Const.i.tution," showing an intimate acquaintance with the anatomical knowledge of the day; but in both cases it was not, as one might infer from her references to Greek and Latin authors, from original sources. Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," Archbishop Usher's "Annals of the World," and Pemble's "Period of the Persian Monarchy," were all found in Puritan libraries, though she may have had access to others while still in England. Pemble was in high favor as an authority in Biblical exposition, the t.i.tle of his book being a stimulant to every student of the prophecies: "The Period of the Persian Monarchy, wherein sundry places of Ezra, Nehemiah and Daniel are cleared, Extracted, contracted and Englished, (much of it out of Dr. Raynolds) by the late learned and G.o.dly man, Mr. William Pemble, of Magdalen Hall, in Oxford."

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

If her muse could but have roused to a sense of what was going on about her, and recorded some episodes which Winthrop dismisses with a few words, we should be under obligations that time could only deepen. Why, for instance, could she not have given her woman's view of that indomitable "virgin mother of Taunton,"

profanely described by Governor Winthrop as "an ancient maid, one Mrs. Poole. She went late thither, and endured much hards.h.i.+ps, and lost much cattle. Called, after, Taunton."

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

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

HERE RESTS THE REMAINS

OF

MRS. ELIZABETH POOL,

A NATIVE OF OLD ENGLAND,

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

A great proprietor of the towns.h.i.+p of Taunton,

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

about which time she settled near this spot; and,

having employed the opportunity

of her virgin state in piety, liberality and sanct.i.ty of manners,

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

to whose memory

this monument is gratefully erected by her next of kin,

JOHN BORLAND, ESQUIRE,

A.D. 1771.

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

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

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

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

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

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