Women of America Part 4

"To the German, teeth like her own, and a tender heart.

"To the Russian, the dignity of a queen.

"Then, going into details, she put gayety on the lips of the Neapolitan _wit in the brain of the Irish girl_ good sense in the heart of the Flemish girl; and, when nothing remained to be given, she arose to take her flight.

"'And I?' said the Parisian to her, detaining her by the floating border of her tunic.

"'I had forgotten you.'

"'Entirely forgotten, madam.'

'"I overlooked you. But what can I do? My bag of gifts is empty.'

"She reflected an instant, and then called around her the recipients of her gifts, told them the situation, and asked them to share their treasures with their unfortunate sister. Who could refuse a fairy, and above all the Blue Fairy? So, with the graciousness always conferred by happiness, these girls in turn approached the neglected Parisian and as they pa.s.sed her one threw her a part of her black hair, another a tint of her rosy complexion; this one a beam of her joyousness, that one a touch of her sensibility; and thus it came about that the Parisian, so poor, so obscure, so eclipsed by her sisters, found herself in an instant, by this generous division, richer and more attractively endowed than any of her companions."

Now this charming little parable is by courtesy true of the Parisienne; but it is far truer of the American woman, for of her it might have been written as a parable indeed. The product of no one blood, no isolated race, she has been given by the fusion of variant races in her ancestry an origin and a tradition, both physical and mental, such as has been granted to no other woman of whom history tells us. Into the ancestry of the English woman entered the elements of the Celtic blood, Brythonic and Goidal, of the Saxons and Teutons, of the later Normans and even Provencals, while through all, perhaps, ran the strain of the primitive Briton and Pict; but not even in this mingling of races can she compare with her American sister in diversity of racial source. Moreover, the English stock, which we unite in calling--incorrectly--the Anglo-Saxon, has remained permanent in type and fount; but this is not so with the American. This latter is in constant process of modification by the introduction of new progenital elements, and it cannot now be prophesied when there will be a clearly-defined race, with individual and permanent characteristics, established upon this side of the great seas.

Therefore the American woman is the heir of the ages in a sense never before true of anyone. As with the Parisian in the story, so with the American woman in truth, all races have united in bringing her of their best gifts. It is for her to make of these the best that she may; certainly none of her sisters has ever begun her career with such fortune brought her by destiny as a birth-gift.

It must not, however, be forgotten or unnoted that, while the American woman is thus rich in a heritage unequalled by that granted to any of her sisters, being world-heir instead of heir to a race, she has some corresponding disadvantages to overcome in her effort to influence as a racial representative the currents of world-thought and world-progress.

She has behind her no national tradition stretching far back into a past so remote that it has ceased to be effect and has become merely foundation. The American woman, alone of all the representatives of the higher cultures, has no effective nationality to shape her trend. She is a product of her time only, not of time and ancient tradition mingled; she has no distinct nationality of growth and line of progress. Every other woman of Caucasian race has a past to which to refer as inspiration and cause, a past which is a story of upward growth, of ever-increasing culture. The American woman found her culture ready for her--was already, at her birth, the child and expression of the highest civilization known to her day. She had no need of exerting formative influence upon her race; all was already done to her hand. Thus she lacks the greatest of all traditions--the tradition of growth and development.

Yet, though not of native production, though lacking the influence of constant-trending nationality, the American woman is and always has been strongly individual. While she is not an indigenous development, not a result of racial growth and broadening, yet her development has been essentially characteristic. She has reached forward upon lines of variant trend from those of her sisters of other cultures, and she is truly a product of her country in that she has been shaped by the conditions of the time and circ.u.mstances of that country's birth. There was breathed into her from the first the informing spirit of the typical American civilization the spirit of freedom. And into her nature has also come another spirit distinctively American--the spirit of the wilderness subdued and conquered, of a barren land made to yield its treasures to the arm of the pioneer the spirit of conquest. There is no new gift of mind or soul brought to her by other nations that has not been modified by these twin spirits. Thus, though heir to all nations and peoples, though product of all cultures, she remains typically American in dominant traits, in the path in which she has chosen to set her feet. Latin and Teuton, Slav and Celt, she has in her veins the blood of them all; but she is still less their result than their modification, and she is still the child of America even more than of the world which has given her life.

The conditions under which the northern continent of America was first settled were somewhat peculiar as contrasted with those of any other settlement whose full history we know. It was entirely different, for example, from the settlement of South America or Mexico. In both the latter cases there was what may be described as a blow and a victory; there was a conquest over a primitive, even if remarkably civilized people, and that was the end of the matter save for the mere formal colonization which followed. This was not the case with the colonization of North America. There was no overt or complete conquest; on the contrary, there was at first overture of peace between the inhabitants of the country and the newcomers. This did not last; the whole of the first history of the colonization of North America may be summed up, at least in its most prominent aspect, in one word--war. But this warfare was not decisive; it was not waged against a nation, but against nations, fighting individually and jealously of each other indeed,--else they must have prevailed at first,--but yet constantly bringing forward new disputants of the t.i.tle of the newcomers to the land.

The country had to be won from its original owners step by step, not by one or many blows; the process of reclamation was by a steady pus.h.i.+ng back of the aborigines, not by a conquest such as that of Norman over Saxon or even Englishman over Maori. There was no conquered race to become eventually amalgamated with its conquerors; the history of all the first period of settlement is the history of civilization driving barbarism before it as it marched on. But for such methods there was need of a somewhat peculiar and very strenuous civilization; the desired result was not to be won by any graces or abstractions, but by the prevailing of white stamina, bravery, and ingenuity over red cunning and tradition and honesty--of the axe over the tomahawk, of the rifle over the bow. It was the triumph of the knowledge rather than the principles belonging to a higher culture than that which was going down; it was Friar Bacon with his gunpowder, not Francis Bacon with his learning, who was fighting the battle of the white against the red, and was affecting the progress of the world.

In conditions arising from strife woman has but little place. She may indeed be present, and even be a part of the conditions which are inevitable in times of conquest; but she is there only as an accident, not as a requisite. The elimination of the influence of woman from the trend of present civilization would be fatal to all approach to any worthy goal; but in the time of the beginnings of our country's story woman was a hindrance rather than a help to progress, since by her presence and the consequent anxiety and by her weakness in physical prowess she enfeebled the fighting powers of the garrison or village.

Even so, she had her part, and an honorable one, in the events which established white dominance in America; but it was one that was necessarily subordinate in the eyes of the chroniclers of those times, and so we hear but little of women in the flush of our country's dawn.

It is not to be questioned that in the first colonies planted by England in the New World there were women--perhaps nearly as many as men. We are apt to forget, by the way, that Virginia was originally settled by the Spaniards under Menendez, the perpetrator of the terrible ma.s.sacre in Florida by which his name is best remembered, and that the Latin races, both Spanish and French, long antic.i.p.ated the English in colonization of our country. It is quite certain that in all these early Latin colonies there were women and that these bore no inconsiderable part in the events which were trending, though sometimes by devious paths, to the establishment of Caucasian empire in America; but their names are unknown to us and we are even ignorant of their place in the history of their time. The story of southern settlement, as far as this has any effect upon the present, begins for us with the settlement of Roanoke Island by Sir Walter Raleigh's ill-fated colony. The tale of its mysterious disappearance is too well known to call for recapitulation here; but before that sudden and final ending of its story we have chronicles which tell us that among these pioneer pilgrims were women, mostly wives of the men settlers, who bore their part in the burden and heat of the day,--and those days were toilsome and full of peril,--as well as their more active lords. Also to that lost colony belongs the honor of having reared the first alien child born on American soil, the forerunner of the race that was to make that soil its own,--Virginia Dare, the little maiden whose pa.s.sing was as mysterious as her coming was ominous. The first of the enormous army of the conquering palefaces who were to overrun the land like locusts, she pa.s.sed away into the mysterious silence of the woods as the standard bearer of the advance, leaving her name to be a shadowy record for all future ages and the very embodiment of the spirit of romance that was in the story of the subjugation of America. Had she lived the normal life of the woman pioneer, her memory would have lacked something of romance; but her unknown fate, and her position in the van of the great coming nation of Americans, keep her in remembrance.

Jamestown was founded on May 13, 1607, and with its foundation began the real era of English rule in America. We know but little of the place of woman in the first days of the colony, and it is not until 1608 that we find any record of female influence or even presence. At this time, Captain Newport, who had brought from England the first fleet and in whose honor Newport News--originally Newport Ness--was named, made his reappearance with a number of fresh settlers, among them being Mistress Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras by name, who was shortly afterward wedded to Master John Laydon and thus won for herself fame as the first woman of English blood to be married on American soil. By this time, Jamestown had grown to have a population of more than five hundred souls, of whom not more than two hundred were fighting men; so that the proportion of women and children must have been far larger than might be supposed by those looking at the circ.u.mstances of colonization and existence. It must have taken a stout heart in a woman's breast to face the unknown dangers of the unknown world; and soon the women of the infant colony had need for all their bravery. There is no doubt that the women played a n.o.ble part in the terrible days that followed the Indian siege of Jamestown--the days which were afterward known as the "Starving Time." Not more than sixty of the original five hundred souls remained at the end of that period; and its record presents the probably unique account of women of the higher civilizations descending to the horrors of cannibalism, the "common kettel" at last containing the bodies of Indians and even of kinsmen. Indeed, there was one foul deed of that time wherein a woman was directly concerned, though as victim, not princ.i.p.al: a colonist killed his wife and had eaten part of the body before he was discovered. He was burned alive; but those who punished him for his crime looked fearfully forward to the day when their own temptations might become too strong. At last came succor; and there seems to be for us a.s.surance of the temper and mettle of the women of that time when we find that of the sixty survivors a fair proportion was of the weaker s.e.x. There were children also, witnesses to the devotion of their mothers in their care.

The colony was abandoned; but only for three days, and then began the time of uninterrupted English dominance. There is, however, in its history nothing of importance to our subject until we reach 1621,--very near the limit which has been set as the end of the "period of settlement." At this time there occurred an event so peculiar and so far-reaching in its social results and withal so intimately connected with the general, though not the particular, chronicle of woman in the early colonies that it may be set forth in some fulness, even though it was one that does not give us any instance of feminine development. But it was so typical of its time and so ominous of the mothers that moulded the characters of the native-born pioneers in the southern settlements that it has its legitimate place in a history of American women. That event is the coming of the "maids," as they were called in the old chronicle from which we draw most of our knowledge concerning the early settlers of Virginia.

Sir Edwin Sandys, being at the head of the London Company, in whose hands were now the interests of the Virginia plantations, devised the plan of sending out as wives to the Virginia adventurers a number of respectable young women. It is probable that Sandys was instigated by the thought of the dangers of mixed marriages with the Indians, which were apt to result from the paucity of women of Caucasian race,--for many young men had of late been tempted to try their fortunes in the New World, and the proportion of women had failed among the settlers. Sandys was in every way a believer in vigorous immigration, and in one year he sent out one thousand two hundred and sixty-one new settlers; these he was desirous of attaching to the soil of their new country,--a thing that could be done only by aiding them there to establish a home. So he secured a cargo of young women, ninety in number, who were willing to go to a far land in search of husbands. Whether he had great difficulty in finding such women, or whether matrimony as a prospect, even though with an indeterminate partner, was so attractive to the average spinster of the day as to make her eager to embrace any opportunity which held certainty of result, cannot be known; but the "maids" went, though under somewhat peculiar and even, to modern eyes, degrading conditions. For the thrifty company was not minded that the prospective husbands should have their wives as free gifts; no, they must pay for them as for any other chattel, and the price fixed was one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco each, the value of this amount of the weed being about eighty dollars at present values. One would think that, if the matter was to be one of barter, the company might have set a higher price upon a wife, even if only out of compliment to the s.e.x; but doubtless the company knew the true value of the goods which it purveyed.

It must be admitted that the wors.h.i.+pful company, notwithstanding its parsimonious spirit in the matter of vend, acted in good faith with both prospective husbands and present "maids." It had already made many regulations intended to promote matrimony by distinguis.h.i.+ng in favor of married men; and in the selection and care of the feminine cargo exported it took the utmost precautions to ensure the purity of the women offered as wives. Moreover, the "maids" were carefully guarded from imposition or force. Orders were straitly given that "In case they cannot be presently married, we desire that they may be put with several householders that have wives until they can be supplied with husbands.... We desire that the marriage be free, according to nature, and we would not have these maids deceived and married to servants, but only such freemen and tenants as have means to maintain them... not enforcing them to marry against their wills." However, there was very little need for these precautions, since the men of the settlement flocked in crowds to the sale of the ladies, and the only difficulty was that there were more suitors than there were fair ones to make them happy. The scene presented must have been very much like that to be found at the old hiring fairs of England, and there does not seem to have been more embarra.s.sment on the part of the "maids" while their charms were being appraised by their suitors than if they had been merely disposing of their services for a short time and in menial capacity. It is impossible to suppose that women who would seek matrimony under such circ.u.mstances were of a very refined type; but, on the other hand, they must have been possessed of bravery and independence beyond the common lot of women of whatever cla.s.s. Later, sixty other "maids," "young, handsome, and chaste," according to the chronicle, were induced to come out to the colony under the same conditions, and these and their predecessors were among the founders of the race which developed into the soldiers of the Revolution and of the yet more terrible struggle of later years.

Unfortunately, there were at this time introduced into the young colony two elements that were to affect it, one slightly and temporarily only, the other profoundly and for as long as there was in the South a distinctiveness of culture. These were the practice of sending criminals to Virginia and the introduction of slavery. To the first number of settlers sent over by Sandys, James I. added one hundred felons, and this was by no means the last s.h.i.+pload of criminals to be exported to the Virginias. These criminals included both men and women, and their introduction among the colonists, though on the pretence of their being indented servants, was an evil which for long found results in the lower strata of the growing civilization. The women, generally of the lowest dregs of English life,--where not political convicts, who were of course of entirely different stamp,--were "hired" by the more dissolute of the unmarried male colonists, and became openly their mistresses; and thus there came into existence a social element which was to do important if insidious work in the undermining of the older morals of the settlement.

Slavery, however, was of far more import, and affected all the future civilization. In August, 1619, twenty negroes were sold as slaves to some of the planters, the blacks having been brought by a Dutch s.h.i.+p.

This was the rise of the African cloud, as yet no bigger than a man's hand, but in time to grow to most portentous dimensions, and to bear the whirlwind as its legitimate progeny. It may be questioned why note is made of the rise of slavery in a book devoted to the history of woman; but to those who will trouble to think the reason is evident. The woman is always at once a formative cause and a product of her civilization; and the civilization of the South was built upon the inst.i.tution of slavery. To comprehend the culture even the nature of the Southern lady we must keep constantly in mind the influence of the national inst.i.tution, so that, as its effects will have to be frequently noted in the future, it is not amiss to chronicle here the small root which afterward spread to such upas growth.

Turning to matters more immediately of the time with which we are at present concerned, a proclamation of Governor Wyat, issued shortly before the fall of the Virginia Company and the consequent beginning of the real colonial period, is worthy of note as bearing upon the universal story of women. Though including men as well as women in its provisions, the proclamation was aimed chiefly at the latter, and its intent was the breaking up of the seemingly common habit of becoming engaged to more than one person at a time. A man was to be whipped for doing so vile an action, though a woman might escape with a fine. The worthy governor forbade women "to contract themselves to two several men at one time," for the reason that "women are yet scarce and in much request, and this offense has become very common, whereby great disquiet has arisen between parties and no small trouble to the government." It was further proclaimed that "Every minister should give notice in his church that what man or woman soever should use any word or speech tending to a contract of marriage to two several persons at one time...

as might entangle or breed scruples in their consciences, should for such their offense either undergo corporal correction or be punished by fine or otherwise, according to the quality of the person so offending."

Such a regulation would not be popular nowadays; but coquetry seems to have been of more serious moment then. That flirtation should threaten the government itself suggests a singular state of affairs indeed.

It is now time to turn to a consideration of another settlement--the only one that rivalled that of Virginia in effectiveness of result and continuity. For the settlements in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and others--with one exception, to be reserved for later brief consideration--did not continue the civilization which they established, but took their later culture, that which survives, from the more prepotent colonies of Virginia and New England. Therefore they do not enter into our present inquiry, since they produced no feminine type or even individual of note; it is to the more northern and southern settlements that we must look for the foundations and matrices of American femininity. We have glanced at that of the South; let us glean what we may of the story of women in that of the North.

It was on November 11, 1620, that the Pilgrim Fathers, as they have come to be known to history, united in an agreement which was the foundation of const.i.tutional government in America. They had been brought, rather as it seemed by Divine Providence than by their own guidance, to a more northern sh.o.r.e than that to which they had intended voyaging, and they had determined to make that place their colonial abode. Tradition records that the first to step on the famous Plymouth Rock was a woman, Mary Chilton by name, and the circ.u.mstance has brought her name down to us of this day. It would not seem a difficult manner of attaining immortality, that of stepping from a boat to a rock; most women, being gifted with the ordinary means of locomotion, could do as much; but circ.u.mstances decide the value of every action, and so Mary Chilton achieved fame by one of the simplest and most natural acts of her whole existence. There are those who deny the very existence of Mary Chilton and sneer at the tradition that makes a woman lead the way to the florescence of American nationality; and it must be confessed that Mary Chilton, having taken the step which was to preserve her from forgetfulness, disappears as completely as if she had never lived. But we like to think the legend true, for it was most appropriate that a woman should head the march to that land where women were destined to be such a controlling force and where, as in no other country, women were to lead in many of the greatest movements that have crowned the civilization of our own day. One likes to believe in Mary Chilton; and it is something in favor of the story that the name of James Chilton is found attached to the doc.u.ment which has already been referred to and that it would be quite in keeping with Puritan superst.i.tion to send a young and pure maiden before them as their advance guard into the unknown land which was to be won by strength of soul as well as of arm.

At least we know that there were women, and those in due proportion, among the settlers. The total number of pilgrims has always been stated as small, and the _Mayflower_, their little vessel, is said to have been of but one hundred and eighty tons burden; but it is evident that there has been error in both these matters, judging by the large number of New Englanders whose ancestors "came over in the _Mayflower_." If half these genealogical tracings are founded on fact, the supposed tiny _Mayflower_ must have been the forerunner of our present huge ocean liners; but, be this as it may, we have record that the first of these many descendants was born on the day following the arrival of the vessel. It was not a girl this time, as had been the case with the first child born of English parents on Virginia soil; it was a boy, and he was appropriately named Peregrine, which signifies "pilgrim." While not directly germane to our subject--save so far as having been born of woman makes all men contributory to the history of women--it may be interesting to state that this first child of the Pilgrims lived to the age of eighty-three years, and died at Marshfield, where later died the greatest of New Englanders.

The influence of the women of the colonists was doubtless great in maintaining the courage and constancy of the men; but, as was the case with the early settlers in Virginia, we have little or no particular record of the feminine portion of the settlement. We are told of Priscilla, "the Puritan Maiden" in Longfellow's poem, _The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish_, and we are entirely at liberty to account her a real personage if we desire to do so. It is at least certain that Miles Standish was the valiant captain pictured by the poet and that John Alden to whom the poet ascribes the office of deputy-wooer was one of the Pilgrim Fathers--whether the latter _in esse_ or _in futuro_ we are not told, though knowledge on this point might have bearing upon the authenticity of the story of Priscilla and if the rest of the legend is not true it is at least well imagined. Moreover, it may be a.s.serted that it is true in the deeper sense of truth, whether or not it be loyal to mere fact. The picture drawn for us of the Puritan maiden is typically true and therefore worthy of quotation even in a volume dedicated to the Muse of history rather than to her of poesy:

"Ever of her he thought, when he read in his Bible on Sunday Praise of the virtuous woman, as she is described in the Proverbs-- How the heart of her husband doth safely trust in her always, How all the days of her life she will do him good and not evil, How she seeketh the wool and the flax and worketh with gladness, How she layeth her hand to the spindle and holdeth the distaff, How she is not afraid of the snow for herself or her household, Knowing her household are clothed with the scarlet cloth of her weaving."

For they were no idle b.u.t.terflies of fas.h.i.+on, no languid great dames, these wives and daughters of the Pilgrims. Their hands knew the rush of the thread on the wheel, the touch of the distaff, and were even not unacquainted at need with the weight of musket and bird-gun. They were cast to some extent in the fine old Spartan mould, these Pilgrim mothers; they feared G.o.d--and nothing else--and they bent their energies to the performance of their sole aspiration, that of "doing their duty in that state of life to which it had pleased G.o.d to call them." It was a state of life that held peril and toil and little reward for these things; but they cared nothing for this, these splendid pilgrim dames, but lived their lives bravely and died with the consciousness that they had done their best to make n.o.ble the birth of a new land which should shelter their children forever.

The first authentic record that we have of an individual woman in the time of the first northern settlement comes to us in the shape of a death, as the first feminine name of the Roanoke settlers came to us connected with a birth. It was in 1630, when the settlement of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay had begun to take some aspect of permanency, that there came into its harbor a fleet of some ten or eleven s.h.i.+ps, the flags.h.i.+p, a vessel of three hundred and fifty tons, being named the _Arabella_. She was thus called because of the presence on board of Lady Arabella Johnson, wife of a commoner called Isaac Johnson. The pair had come to America to breathe a purer atmosphere of freedom in religion than they had been able to find at home; but Lady Arabella was not destined long to enjoy the liberty she sought. The words of Cotton Mather may be quoted in regard to her, the first of n.o.ble blood to succ.u.mb to the rigors of the new climate:

"Of those who soon dyed after their first arrival, not the least considerable was the lady Arabella, who left an earthly paradise in the family of an _Earldom_, to encounter the sorrows of a wilderness, for the entertainments of a _pure wors.h.i.+p_ in the house of G.o.d; and then immediately left that wilderness for the Heavenly paradise, whereto the compa.s.sionate Jesus, of whom she was a follower, called her. We have read concerning a n.o.ble woman of Bohemia, who forsook her friends, her plate, her house and all, and because the gates of the city were guarded, crept through the common sewer, that she might enjoy the inst.i.tutions of our Lord at another place where they might be had. The spirit which acted that n.o.ble woman, we may suppose carried this blessed lady thus to and through the hards.h.i.+ps of an American desart. But as for her virtuous husband, Isaac Johnson, Esq.,

'"Hetry'd To live without her, lik'd it not, and dy'ed.'

"His mourning for the death of his honourable consort was too bitter to be extended a year; about a month after _her_ death _his_ ensued, unto the extreme loss of the whole plantation."

There is here much cause for smiling, especially in old Dr. Mather's unconscious sn.o.bbery as to the "paradise of an earldom," even to italicising the important word, and to his wonder how anyone could leave such delights for the goal of a "desart"; but there is also some moving if equally unconscious pathos, and for this, as well as for the fact of Lady Arabella's being the first feminine name to come down to us from Plymouth in the dignity of history, her virtues and fate are here recorded. Moreover, that otherwise unfamed lady from Bohemia who left her "plate" behind her in her search for religious liberty deserves to be rescued from oblivion.

[Ill.u.s.tration 4: THE COURTs.h.i.+P OF MILES STANDISH.

After the painting by C. Y. Turner.

_We are told of Priscilla, "the Puritan Maiden" in Longfellow's poem_ The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish, _and we are entirely at liberty to account her a real personage if we desire to do so. It is at least certain that Miles Standish was the valiant captain pictured by the poet and that John Alden to whom the poet ascribes the office of deputy-wooer was of the Pilgrim Fathers._]

In the same vessel that brought Lady Arabella to the inhospitable sh.o.r.es of America there came another woman whose name better deserves memorial, as far as is concerned lasting influence of life, than does that of the saintly lady commemorated by Cotton Mather. Anne Dudley was the daughter of an old servitor of the Count of Lincoln, the father of Lady Arabella, and was herself married to Simon Bradstreet, destined to be governor of Ma.s.sachusetts. She was as devout and devoted as Lady Arabella herself, and she was of yet finer stamp in that she was a poet. She was a Puritan of the Puritans; her father was later elected to be governor of the colony, preceding his son-in-law in that distinguished position, so that Anne Bradstreet must have been from the beginning of her life permeated with the very spirit of Puritanism. One would not think that such training and environment would be favorable to the fostering of the poetic faculty; severity of creed and the aesthetic soul do not often go hand in hand. Yet she was the first professional poet of New England,--indeed, probably of America; and, if fault be found for calling her a poet of America when she was not a native product, answer may be made that the New Englanders strenuously claimed her as their own under the t.i.tle of the Tenth Muse, and that she was, if not a product of the soil of Ma.s.sachusetts, at least a product of the spirit that made that soil sacred. She was very young, not yet twenty, when she arrived at Plymouth, and most of her poems were written during the first decade of her residence in the colony. Since, in this portion of our history there are few feminine names upon which to expatiate, it may not be a waste of s.p.a.ce to give in full the t.i.tle page of the first volume of poems issued by the "American Sappho":

"THE TENTH MUSE--Lately sprung up in America; or Severall Poems, compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of delight.

Wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and description of

(ELEMENTS.

THE FOUR (CONSt.i.tUTIONS.

(AGES OF MAN.

(SEASONS OF THE YEAR.

Together with an Exact Epitomie of the Four Monarchies,

(a.s.sYRIAN.

THE (PERSIAN.

(GRECIAN.

(ROMAN.

Also a Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the late troubles, With divers other pleasant and serious Poems. By a Gentlewoman in those parts. Printed at London for Stephen Bowtell at the Signe of the Bible in Popes Head Alley. 1650."

It will be noticed that the gifted poet was forced to have recourse to her native land to produce her works, and it may be for the repute of her modesty, it is to be hoped that it was that she never saw the t.i.tle page until it had been printed. However, it would seem that there were many of her time who believed that she had some just cause to claim the t.i.tle which had been given her. One of her admirers wrote in more or less admirable verse a long compliment to her which contained the notable though undeniably plagiarized line:

"None but her self must dare commend her parts."