1 A second history, that of New England, was also written by a governor, John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Among his accounts of weightier matters he does not forget to tell of the little throp, everyday occurrences, of the chimney that John Win 1588-1649. took fire, of the calf that wandered away and was lost, of the two young men on shipboard who were punished for fighting by having their hands tied behind them and being ordered to walk up and down the deck all day, of the strange visions and lights that were seen and the strange voices that were heard. It is such details as these that carry us back to the lives of our ancestors, their fears and their troubles. 3. The Bay Psalm Book, 1640. While these two histories were being written, three learned men in Massachusetts set to work to prepare a version of the Psalms to use in church. A momentous question arose : Would it be right to use a trivial and unnecessary ornament like rhyme? "There is sometimes rhyme in the original Hebrew," said one, "and therefore it must be right to use it." Thus established, they took their pens in hand, and in 1640 the famous Bay Psalm Book was published in America, the first book printed on American soil. This was the version of Psalm xxxv, 5: As chaffe before the winde, let them The "Admonition to the Reader" at the end of the book declares that many of these psalms may be sung to "neere fourty common tunes," and indeed there seems no reason why a hymn like this should not be sung to one tune as well as another. Now these struggling poets were scholars; two of them were university grad uates. They had lived in England during the noblest age of English poetry. Why, then, did they make the Psalms into such doggerel? The reason was that they were in agonies of conscience lest they should allow the charm of some poetical expression to lure them away from the seriousness of truth; and they declared with artless complacency and somewhat unnecessary frankness that they had "attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry.” A generous amount of verse was written in the colonies even in the early days. Many of the settlers were educated men, fully accustomed to putting their thoughts on paper, and they seemed to feel that it dignified a thought to make it into verse. Religion was the allabsorbing subject, and therefore they have left us many thousand lines of religious hopes and fears. Unfortunately, it takes more than study to make a man a poet, and hardly a line of all the accumulation can be called poetry. 4. Michael Wigglesworth, 1631–1705. The most lengthy piece of this early colonial rhyme was produced The Day of by the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth of Doom, 1662. Malden. It was called The Day of Doom, or, A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Fudgment. It painted with considerable imaginative power the Last Judgment as the Reverend Michael thought it ought to be. After the condemnation of the other sinners, the "reprobate infants," the children who had died in babyhood, appear at the bar of God and plead that they are not to blame for what Adam did. They say: Not we, but he ate of the Tree whose fruit was interdicted: Yet on us all of his sad Fall, The answer is: A Crime it is, therefore in bliss the easiest room in Hell. The early colonists bought this book in such numbers that it may be looked upon as America's first and greatThe first year 1800 copies were est literary success. sold; and it is estimated that with our increased popula tion this would be equivalent to a sale of 2,000,000 copies. to-day. 5. Anne Bradstreet, 1612. or 1613-1672. The praise of Michael Wigglesworth was as naught when compared with the glory of one Mistress Anne Bradstreet, who abode with her husband and eight children in the wilderness of Andover and therein did write much poetry. People were in ecsta sies over her compositions, and they did not accuse her publisher of exaggeration when he wrote on the title. Several 1678. page of her book, "Severall Poems, compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of delight." She was called "The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in Poems, &c. America." Learned Cotton Mather declared that her work "would outlast the stateliest marble." However that may be, it was certainly the nearest approach to poetry that the colonies produced during their first century, and now and then we find a phrase with some little poetic merit. In her poem Contemplations, for instance, are the lines: 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, 6. The children's book. One cannot help wondering a little what the children found to read in colonial days, for the youngest baby Pilgrim was an old man before it occurred to any one to write a child's book. Even then, it was a book that most of the boys and girls of to-day would think rather dull, for it was a serious little schoolbook called the New England Primer. No one knows who wrote it, but it was published by one Benjamin Harris at his coffee-house and bookstore in Boston, "by the New Eng land Primer, between 1687 and 1690. Town-Pump near the Change," some time between 1687 and 1690. It contained such knowledge as was thought absolutely necessary for children. After the alphabet came a long list of two-letter combinations, "ab, eb, ib, ob, ub; ac, ec, ic, oc, uc," etc.; then a list of words of one syllable; and at last the child had worked his way triumphantly to "a-bom-i-na-tion" and "qual-ifi-ca-tion." There were several short and simple prayers, and there was a picture of the martyr, John Rogers, standing composedly in the flames while his family wept around him, and the executioner grinned maliciously. There was a sec ond alphabet with a rhyme and a pic- A In ADAM's Fall ture for every let ter. It began: In Adam's Fall We sinnéd all. In the course of produced in Amer-K Proud Korah's troop ica during the colonial period. Was fwallowed up. THE ALPHABET IN THE NEW ENGLAND PRIMER |