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test of time, and it is not their poetic merit which will lead any one at the present day to read her verses.

The little that is known of her life has been often told. She and her husband were alike of gentle blood and gentle breeding. She was born in 1612, and married when only sixteen years old to a youth of promise nine years older than herself. Two years later, in 1630, they accompanied her father, Mr. Thomas Dudley, so distinguished in the later history of the Massachusetts colony, on the memorable voyage of Winthrop and his companions in the Lady Arbella. Next after Winthrop, Dudley was the foremost man of the emigration, and the young Bradstreet was already one of the "assistants" of the Massachusetts Company, and seems to have been held in respect for his own character, as well as for his relationship to one of the leaders of the party. Of Mrs. Bradstreet during the hard early years of the Massachusetts settlement nothing is recorded, and in her poems she tells us nothing of the events of her life at this time. It is, indeed, a striking fact in regard to her poetry, and a criticism upon it as well, that in it all there is scarcely a reference to New England, and no word from which one might gather that it had been

written in the New World at a time so difficult, so interesting, so strange to these new-comers from the Old. All her allusions, her figures of speech, her illustrations are drawn from the old worn-out literary stock. No New England bird sings in her pages; it is Philomel, or the lark; no New England flower seems to have been dear to her; no incident or aspect of life peculiar to New England is described or even referred to. Nothing can be gathered from her verses in regard to the modes of existence or the social experience of the first emigrants to this "uncouth corner of the world," as Governor Belcher later called it. Of all those things about which we should be curious and interested to hear there is not a word. It is noteworthy how little of poetic sentiment the New Englanders displayed during the first century of the settlement. There was abundance of religious feeling; abundance of domestic sentiment; a quantity of verse was written; but in the whole mass there is scarcely one line instinct with imagination, and few that show a play of fancy or sustained liveliness of humor. The verses for the most part seem to partake of the rugged character of the land which the Englishborn settlers were mastering, and if every now and

then there be a gleam of humor, as in some of the verses of the eccentric Reverend Mr. Nathaniel Ward, of which an illustration is afforded by the commendatory piece which he prefixed to the first edition of Mrs. Bradstreet's poems-if occasionally, I say, there be a flash of wit or humor, it has no native color, but might as well have had its origin in Old as in New England.

It was not that the colonists were uninstructed people, or that they lacked knowledge of letters; but their minds were occupied mainly with other matters more serious to them than poetry. They were busy in providing for the essential needs of material life, and busier still in saving their souls according to a doctrine which left them little inclination for what seemed to them so trivial an occupation as the making of verse. They were cut off from association with cultivated society, and were remote alike from the current of the intellectual life of the time and from the sources of refinement and of taste. This is strikingly evident even in Mrs. Bradstreet's poems, which, indeed, were the best the first generation of emigrants to New England produced. She had not been deprived of books, for her father was a lover of

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CHIEF JUSTICE PAUL DUDLEY. Son of Joseph, and founder of the Dudleian Lecture

at Harvard College.

From the original painting owned by Dudley R. Child, Esq.,

Boston, Mass.

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