conceits which were favored by poets of her time. Perhaps the most amusing is one derived from her favorite Du Bartas, who, in his account of the fishes in the Fifth Day of the Creation, tells how the mullet was distinguished above all other creatures for its fidelity to its mate. So Mrs. Bradstreet, writing to her husband, says:

"Return my dear, my joy, my only love,

Unto thy hind, thy mullet, and thy dove,
Who neither joys in pasture, house, nor streams;
The substance gone, O me, these are but dreams.
Together at one tree, oh let us browse,

And like two turtles roost within one house,
And like the mullets in one river glide-
Let's still remain but one, till death divide.

Thy loving love, and dearest dear,

At home, abroad and everywhere."

But perhaps of all her domestic poems there is none which has a truer accent of emotion than one written "On my Son's return out of England, July 17, 1661.” The son had been away for more than four years, and she begins her verses with,

"All praise to Him who now hath turned
My fears to joys, my sighs to song,

My tears to smiles, my sad to glad:

He's come for whom I waited long."

And again in the next year, when her husband returned from a visit to England, whither he, with the Rev. John Norton, the elder, had been sent on an important mission as agents of the Colony, she breaks out into praises to the Lord with,

"What shall I render to Thy Name,

Or how Thy praises speak?

My thanks how shall I testify?

O Lord, thou know'st I'm weak."

Such utterances are witnesses alike of the depth of her piety and the strength of her affections.

I said just now that it was difficult for us to reconstruct in imagination the days of the New England. woman of the first generation transplanted from the Old World. Our lives are too remote from theirs in all external conditions to enable us to picture save in outline the interests and the occupations with

which they were most concerned. But it is not difficult to form the image of a character like Mrs. Bradstreet's as it is shown in her own writing, under the conditions of life which we know must have existed for her. It is the image of a sweet, devout, serene, and affectionate nature, of a woman faithfully discharging the multiplicity of duties which fell upon the mother of many children in those days when little help from outside could be had; when the mother must provide for all their wants with scanty means of supply, and must watch over their health with the consciousness that little help from without was to be had in case of even serious need. I fancy her occupying herself in the intervals of household cares with the books which her own small library and her father's afforded, and writing, with pains and modest satisfaction, the verses which were so highly esteemed at the time, but which for us have so little intrinsic interest. She cherished in herself and in her children the things of the mind and of the spirit; and if such memory as her verses have secured for her depend rather on the rare circumstance of a woman's writing them at the time when she did, and in the place where she lived, than upon their poetic worth,

it is a memory honorable to her, and it happily preserves the name of a good woman, among whose descendants has been more than one poet whose verses reflect lustre on her own.1

JANUARY, 1897.

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.

1 Through one of her children she is the ancestress of Richard Henry Dana; through another, of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

EDITOR'S NOTE.

The FIRST EDITION of Mrs. Bradstreet's poems was printed in London in 1650. There had been a press at Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 1638, but there is no reason to suppose that this book was offered to it for printing, for the press was constantly occupied with church, state, and educational documents of importance, and had no leisure for work which was not of stern necessity.

It would seem that the Rev. John Woodbridge, who had come to New England in 1634, and had married Mrs. Bradstreet's younger sister Mercy, was much impressed by his sister-in-law's "gracious demeanor, eminent parts, pious conversation, and courteous disposition," and, upon his return for a visit to the mother country in 1647, took with him a number of her poems in manuscript, and had them printed in London without the consent of the author. To justify himself in his course, he secured a number of commendatory epistles in verse from friends and ad