A GROUP OF EARLY POETESSES.

AMONG the early settlers of the Colonies there was, occasionally, a woman of more than ordinary intelligence, and now and again a ready writer or a verse-maker. Perhaps in all the settlements, North and South, there was no woman equal in mind and spirit to Anne Hutchinson, whom even her enemies acknowledged to be "a masterpiece of woman's wit."

Enthusiasm, unrestrained by tact or worldly considerations, a strain of headstrongness in her religious fervor, and a power of carrying with her the minds and hearts of her hearers, were apparently the leading characteristics of this devoted young woman, the latter trait being perhaps the most difficult for her persecutors to overlook. From the grim travesty of

that trial in which Winthrop, Dudley, Endicott, and other worthies, who had come to the New World for freedom of thought and action, sat in judgment upon one against whom the only charge made was that she exercised this coveted freedom in her life and teaching, we turn with a mingled sense of shame and regret,-shame that men who had come hither for such high purposes could stoop to deeds so unworthy, and regret that a creature of such noble spirit should have been so misunderstood. Had Anne Hutchinson found her way to America half a century later, with the followers of Penn, we can readily imagine the career of usefulness and honor that would have opened for her.

The more tolerant doctrine of the inner light found no place in the spiritual furniture of those who had shaken off the iron hand of a State Church, and when we look back upon the dealings of the early Puritans with one another it seems as if the rule that "might makes right" was as stoutly maintained in New England as in the feudal life of older England.

In the same community that condemned and banished Anne Hutchinson for her teaching of "dangerous doctrine,"* we find another attractive womanly personality, Anne Bradstreet, who is spoken of in the first London edition of her poems as "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America," † but who is dearer to us as our first poetess, singing like a lark in the chill New England morn. Her verses we may not care to read now; although they are characterized by considerable poetic thought and by some graces of poetic treatment, besides bearing marks of an early acquaintance with the great English writers of the past century, some of whom were still living while little Anne Dudley was “lisping

*"Mrs. Hutchinson's custom seems to have been to report the discourses of Mr. John Cotton, and to impress their lessons upon her hearers. In the progress of the discussion the sermons of other ministers were commented upon, and finally her own views presented.”Memorial History of Boston, iv. 334.

†The poetess is also spoken of by an English admirer as "Mistress Anne Bradstreet, at present residing in the Occidental parts of the world in America, alias NOV-ANGLIA."

in numbers," if dealing in numbers at all. To uncongenial surroundings and houses ill fitted to protect the settlers from the bleak winds and storms of a New England winter came Mrs. Bradstreet, from an English home of the better class, which, if boasting few of the luxuries of to-day, was sufficiently comfortable in its appointments to form a strong contrast to the dwellings of the early settlers of Massachusetts. Sensitive, delicately nurtured, her mind always in advance of her frail body, her first American experiences being the illness and death of her friend and fellowvoyager, the lovely Lady Arbella Johnson, and the drowning of young Henry Winthrop, it is not strange that one of Mrs. Bradstreet's earliest poems should have been upon "A Fit of Sickness," nor that it should have been followed a few months later by a joyous outburst of song upon the approach of spring:

"As spring the winter doth succeed,

And leaves the naked trees doe dresse,
The earth all black is cloth'd in green;
At sunshine each their joy expresse.

"My winters past, my stormes are gone,
And former cloudes seem now all fled;
But, if they must eclipse again,

I'll run where I was succored."

What this first spring must have been to these pilgrims when they beheld the gray hill-sides and snow-bound valleys covered with verdure and bloom, and "replenished with thick woods and high trees," we learn from the expressions of that quaint and amusing chronicler, Francis Higginson.

Disposed to make the best of everything, this worthy divine rejoiced alike over the trials and hardships that were good for his soul, and the dainty springs, luscious lobsters, and sweet and wholesome bass that sustained his mortal body, finding here an "increase of corne, which proved this country to be a wonderment, which outstript Joseph's increase in Egypt." Yet, great as was this increase, it was not sufficient to outlast the long stagnation of the winter, when the cold was so great that Judge Sewall tells of the sacramental bread being frozen upon the plate, and when Judge Lynde was in the habit of driving across