A History of American Literature During the Colonial Time ...

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Contents

CHAPTER XI.

NEW ENGLAND : THE VERSE-WRITERS.

I. — The two literary periods in our colonial age — Their points of distinction — The times and the men — Our intended line of march through the second period 5

I

I HAVE taken the year sixteen hundred and seventy-six as the year of partition between the two periods into which our colonial age seems to fall. By a coincidence that is almost dramatic, that year proved to be one of spacious import for both the great English communities then planted in America, and then holding within themselves the types and the hopes of all possible English civilization in the new world. Alike for Virginia and for New England, it was a year in which most doleful mischief, long gathering force from the crimes and the blunders of men, came to its culmination, exploded, and passed away ; — a year of fright, of fury, of outcry and blood and battle-agony, and at last of the sort of silence that is called peace. In that year, Virginia saw the crisis and close of the patriotic insurrection of its own people under the hero, Nathaniel Bacon ; in that year. New England saw the crisis and close of the conspiracy of its exasperated Indians under the hero, Philip. For those two central English communities in America, and for all other English communities that should afterward be grouped around them or issue from them, the year sixteen hundred and seventy-six established two very considerable facts, namely, that English colonists in America could be so provoked as to make physical resistance to the authority of England ; and, second, that English colonists in America could, in the last resort, put down any combination of Indians that might be formed against them. In other words, it was then made evident that English colonists would certainly be safe in the new world, and also that they would not always be colonists. That year completed the proofs that a certain uncounted throng of articulating bipeds, known as Americans — together with the words that they should articulate — were to be endured on this planet, for some ages to come.

Let us turn away, now, from the significance of those events which, at the end of a long and troubled sequence, came to an issue in sixteen hundred and seventy-six, and glance for a moment at the men and women who, in that year, constituted the larger part of the population of the

THE TWO COLONIAL PERIODS, 7

English colonies. Here, at length, we confront a new race of beings under the sun : people who loved England, but had never seen England ; who always called England home, but had never been at home ; who spoke and wrote the English language, but had learned to do so three or four thousand miles from the island in which that language had been hitherto cooped up. Before sixteen hundred and seventy-six, the new civilization in America was principally in the hands of Americans bom in England ; after sixteen hundred and seventy-six, it was principally in the hands of Americans bom in America, and the subjects of such training as was to be had here. Our first colonial period, therefore, transmits to us a body of writings produced by immigrant Americans ; preserving for us the ideas, the moods, the efforts, the very phrases, of the men who founded the American nation ; representing to us, also, the earliest literary results flowing from the reactions of life in the new world upon an intellectual culture formed in the old world. Our second colonial period does more ; it transmits to us a body of writings, produced in the main by the American children of those immigrants, and representing the earliest literary results flowing from the reactions of life in the new world upon an intellectual culture that was itself formed in the new world.

Our first colonial period, just seventy years long, we have now studied with full and earnest care; we have held up before our eyes the tattered and time-stained memorials of its literary activity; we have listened attentively to its multitudinous voices, hushed by death two centuries ago. Each reader has now before him the materials out of which to construct for himself the praise, or the contempt, which he is willing to bestow upon that period. For my part, I have no apology to make for it : I think it needs none. It was a period principally engaged in other tasks than the tasks of the pen ; it laid, quietly and well, the foundation of a new social structure that was to cover a hemisphere, was to give shelter and comfort to myriads of the human race, was to endure to centuries far beyond the gropings of our guesswork. Had it done that deed alone, and left no written word at all, not any man since then could have wondered ; still less could any man have flung at it the reproach of intellectual lethargy or neglect. But if, besides what it did in the founding of a new commonwealth, we consider what it also did in the founding of a new literature — the muchness of that special work, the downright merit of it — we shall find it hard to withhold from that period the homage of our admiration.

From the year sixteen hundred and seventy-six, when our first colonial period ends, there stretches onward a space of just eighty-nine years, at the end of which the American colonies underwent a swift and portentous change, — losing, all at once, their colonial content, and passing suddenly into the earlier and the intellectual stage of their struggle for independence. This space of eighty-nine years forms, of course, our second colonial period ; and it is this which we are now to study.

For the most of this period, and for most purposes of investigation, our history is but a bundle of anecdotes telling of detached groups of communities, — each group working out its own life in its own way, and uttering in some fashion of frank speech its own uppermost thought. Here, at the farthest north, we rest our eyes upon the New England group of communities ; thence, passing along the coast, we encounter the group of the middle colonies. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania; finally, the southern group, Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia. Between the several members of each group there were, perhaps, special intimacies, domestic, commer-. cial, military, religious ; but between the several groups there were almost no intimacies at all.

Moving across this tract of time, we shall make research for whatever writings were produced within it by these clustered populations of Americans. It will be convenient

JOHN NORTON. 9

for US to begin with New England, and to proceed in geographical order southward.

Of nearly all the writers that we are now to deal with, it may be said that they did their most significant work within the limits which we have assigned to our second colonial period ; and yet some of them, the eldest, began their work before that period began ; and others, the youngest, perhaps continued their work after that period ended. In order to give a satisfactory account of them, we shall occasionally find ourselves flitting back, and committing trespass upon the territory which we profess to have abandoned, or even, it may be, advancing into that territory to which in this volume we shall not try to lay claim.

The topic that last engaged our notice, in the literary period just closed, was the verse-writers of New England ; and this topic is the one with which we shall begin our study of the period now to be opened, — thus taking up the thread of the story at the very point where we laid it down. We became somewhat acquainted with the poet, Anne Bradstreet, the only person of an avowed and special vocation in poetry that New England had in its earliest age. The first two poets that we meet on the threshold of our new studies, were men who had grown up in New England under the influence of Anne Bradstreet's fame ; who were, in some sense, her literary children ; and who have left verses in praise of her, that constitute their own best title to praise.

II

Of these two poets, one was John Norton, nephew of the famous Boston minister of the same name; born in 1651; graduated at Harvard in 1671; pastor of the first church at Hingham from 1678 till his death in 1716; during all that time publishing only an election sermon, in 1708, and still earlier, in 1678, a poem occasioned by the death of Anne Bradstreet. It is this poem, "A Funeral

I o HISTOR Y 0)F AMERICAN LITER A TURE.

Elogy upon that pattern and patron of virtue," that will preserve for him a high and permanent memory among the few real singers of our colonial time. We know not what else he did in verse ; but, certainly, the force and beauty that are in this little poem could not have been caught at one grasp of the hand. His poetical strokes were by no means sure ; the literary taint of the time had smitten him ; and even in this sorrowful and stately chant, he once or twice slipped into grotesqueness of conceit, and funereal frivolity. Yet, here is something more than mechanic poetry, something other than inspiration of the thumbnail. To this young American scholar and poet, just then at the opening of his active career, his mind brimming with the imagery of the antique classics, the death of Anne Bradstreet — their one glorious example of poetic power in New England — seemed to come as a sort of elemental loss, a bereavement and a darkening of the earth, at which the sky itself and all its splendid tenants would put on mourning. Therefore, with the fine exaggerating speech of his passion, he cries out :

" Ask not why the great glory of the sky, That gilds the stars with heavenly alchemy,

Ask not the reason of his ecstasy,

Paleness of late, in midnoon majesty ;

Why that the pale-faced Empress of the night

Disrobed her brother of his glorious light.

Did not the language of the stars foretell

A mournful scene, when they with tears did swell ?

Did not the glorious people of the sky

Seem sensible of future misery ?

Behold how tears flow from the learned hill ; How the bereaved Nine do daily fill The bosom of the fleeting air with groans And vvoful accents, which witness their moans.

tt

As he dwells upon it, her death seems so cruel a theft from the world of what the world could ill spare, that his grief passes into wrath :

ft

JOHN NORTON. n

Some do for anguish weep ; for anger, I,

That Ignorance should live, and Art should die.

Black, fatal, dismal, inauspicious day !

Be it the first of miseries to all.

Or last of life defamed for funeral.

When this day yearly comes, let every one

Cast in their urn the black and dismal stone.

Succeeding years, as they their circuit go.

Leap o*er this day, as a sad time of woe."

Then, as this indignant gust has uttered itself, he turns in direct and reverent salutation to the dead poet, for whom he mourns :

" Grave Matron, whoso seeks to blazon thee, Needs not make use of wit's false heraldry ; Whoso should give thee all thy worth, would swell So high, as 'twould turn the world infidel.

To write is easy ; but to write on thee. Truth would be thought to forfeit modesty.

Virtue ne'er dies : time will a poet raise. Born under better stars, shall sing thy praise. Praise her who list, yet he shall be a debtor; For Art ne'er feigned, nor Nature framed, a better. Her virtues were so great, that they do raise A work to trouble fame, astonish praise.

Beneath her feet, pale Envy bites her chain,

And Poison-Malice whets her sting in vain.

Let every laurel, every myrtle bough.

Be stript for leaves to adorn and load her brow :

Victorious wreaths, which, 'cause they never fade,

Wise elder times for kings and poets made.

Let not her happy memory e'er lack

Its worth in Fame's eternal almanac.

Which none shall read, but straight their loss deplore,

And blame their fates they were not born before."^

' The entire poem is in " The Works of Anne Bradstreet," J. H. Ellis's cd. 409-413.

HISTOR Y OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE.

I '

Somewhat older than John Norton, but associated with him in poetic genius and in devotion to Anne Bradstreet, was John Rogers ; a strong and famous man in his day ; one of the early presidents of Harvard College ; in his own person an example of that versatility of gifts which American life has always had in it some pe(:uliar force to develop, — preacher, physician, linguist, scientist, educator, poet. In 1649, at the age of eighteen, he was graduated at Harvard College; from 1656 to 1683, he lived at Ipswich, physician both to the bodies and to the souls of men ; in August, 1683, he was inaugurated as president of Harvard College ; and on the second of July, 1684, during an eclipse of the sun, he died. The tradition of him brings to us a man of uncommon grace of mind and sweetness of temper, of all gentlemanly and scholarly accomplishments ; in fact, " a treasury of benevolence, a storehouse of theologic learning, a library of the choicest literature, a living system of medicine, an embodiment of integrity, a repository of faith, a pattern of Christian sympathy, a garner of all \ virtues." ^ Of course, his portrait hangs upon the walls of the " Magnalia," ^ — a portrait to which is attached the inevitable Matheresque ear-mark, as follows. One day, while president of the college, it happened that his prayer in chapel was only about half as long as usual, — a phenomenon agreeable, doubtless, to the students, but quite inexplicable to them. Indeed, at the moment, no human being knew why that presidential prayer had come to an end so soon ; but, as Cotton Mather judiciously remarks, " Heaven knew the reason." The college was on fire ; and had it not been for the inspired brevity of the president's devotions that day, it ** had been irrevocably laid in ashes." One almost shudders now to contemplate the fascinating motive to collegiate incendiarism, which this

' As may be imagined, this quotation is originally from his tomb-stone ; in spite of which, there is reason to believe that it is^ in the main, trae. . * Volume II. 16-17.

JOH.V ROGERS, 1 3

memorable jjrovidence must have suggested thenceforward, for many generations, to the undergraduate mind, — a possible explanation, indeed, of the numerous conflagrations which, since that time, have desolated the Harvard Yard.

Nearly all memorials of John Rogers's work as a writer have perished. One little poem of his, however, remains, a poem addressed to Anne Bradstreet, and, probably, first published in 1678 ; a monument of the keen enthusiasm which the writings of that admirable woman awakened among the bright young scholars of New England, during the latter part of her own life and for some years afterward ; a monument, also, of its author's literary culture, and of his really high faculty of poetic utterance. The framework of this poem is a modified form of the Chaucerian stanza, the variation being very sweet and effective ; the order of the rhymes is slightly changed, and the seventh line rolls on into a sonorous Alexandrine. • Though, in one place, the poem lapses into a conceit that is gross, and, in fact, damnable, upon the whole it is very noble ; it is of high and sustained imaginative expression ; it shows, likewise, that this Puritan scholar of our little college in the New England wilderness, had not only conversed to good purpose with the classics of pagan antiquity, but had even dared to overleap the barriers interposed by his own sect between themselves and the more dreadful Christian classics of the Elizabethan singers :

"Madam, twice through the Muses' grove I walked, Under your blissful bowers, I shrouding there.

It seemed with nymphs of Helicon I talked; For there those sweet-lipped sisters sporting were;

Apollo with his sacred lute sate by;

On high they made their heavenly sonnets fly;

Posies around they strewed, of sweetest poesy.

Twice have I drunk the nectar of your lines. Which high sublimed my mean-born fantasy.

Flushed with these streams of your Maronian wines,

Above myself rapt to an ecstasy, Methought I was upon Mount Hybla's top, There where I might those fragrant flowers lop, Whence did sweet odors flow, and honey-spangles drop.

Nor barking satyr's breath, nor dreary clouds, Exhaled from Styx, their dismal drops distil

Within these fairy, flowery fields; nor shrouds The screeching night-raven, with his shady quill;

But lyric strings here Orpheus nimbly hits,

Chanting as every humor, age, and season fits.

Here silver swans with nightingales set spells, Which sweetly charm the traveller, and raise

Earth's earthed monarchs from their hidden cells. And to appearance summon lapsed days.

There heavenly air becalms the swelling frays.

And fury fell of elements, allays,

By paying every one due tribute of his praise.

This seemed the site of all those verdant vales. And purled springs, whereat the nymphs do play;

With lofty hills where poets read their tales

To heavenly vaults, which heavenly sounds repay

By echo's sweet rebound ; here ladies kiss,

Circling, nor songs nor dance's circle miss;

But whilst those sirens sung, I sunk in sea of bliss.

Your only hand, those posies did compose;

Your head, the source whence all those springs did flow; Your voice, whence change's sweetest notes arose ;

Your feet, that kept the dance alone, I trow. Then vail your bonnets, poetasters all ; Strike lower amain, and at these humbly fall, And deem yourselves advanced to be her pedestal.

Should all with lowly congas laurels bring;

Waste Flora's magazine, to find a wreath, Or Peneus' banks, 'twere too mean offering :

Your muse a fairer garland doth bequeath

URIAN OAKES. 15

To guard your fairer front : here 'tis your name Shall stand immarbled ; this, your little frame, Shall great Colossus be, to your eternal fame." '

III

The same class of college-boys that produced, in John Rogers, a poet and a Harvard president, produced, likewise, in Urian Oakes, another poet and another Harvard president. The latter, born in 163 1, was reared in the woods of Concord — an air, then and since then, quickening to fine and rugged thought. Though of diminutive body, he gave evidence from childhood of a large and gracious intellect ; in college he won high reputation for scholarship ; when but nineteen years old, he published a set of astronomical calculations, prefixed by this motto of modest reference to himself and his brochure :

Upon his graduation, he devoted himself to theology, and began to preach. Soon, however, yielding to the attractions of England under the Protectorate, he went thither, and accepted the living of Titchfield, Hampshire, where he remained until the year of expulsion, 1662. Nevertheless, he continued to find in England both protection and clerical employment; but in 1671, upon urgent solicitation, he returned to this country, and became pastor of the church at Cambridge. In 1675, he added to his duties as pastor of that church, those of president of Harvard College. In 1681, in the full splendor of his powers and of his usefulness, he died.

A study of the writings of this man, will be likely to convince any one that there is less than the usual mortuary extravagance in the sentence of Increase Mather, that

' This noble poem is reprinted in N. E. Hist, and Geneal. Reg. V. 13S ; and in Works of Anne Bradstreet, J. II. Ellis's ed. 93-96. I have quoted from the latter.

r l6 HISTOR Y OF AMERICAN LITERA TURE.

Urian Oakes "was one of the greatest lights that ever shone in this part of the world, or that is ever like to arise in this horizon."^ He seems to have been what another contemporary* called him, a man of great " art and grace," as well as " a delightful, loving, profitable, fast, and faithful friend." He was distinguished in his day for the unsurpassed elegance and fluency of his Latin; and with respect to his English, it is, perhaps, the richest prose style, — it furnishes the most brilliant examples of originality, breadth, and force of thought, set aglow by flame of passion, by flame of imagination, to be met with in our sermon-literature from the settlement of the country down to the Revolution.*

But the splendid literary capacity of this early American — this product of our pioneer and autochthonous culture — is seen in this : as his sermons are among the noblest specimens of prose to be met with, in that class of writings, during the colonial time, so the one example that is left to us of his verse, reaches the highest point touched by American poetry, during the 'same era. The poem thus referred to, is an elegy upon the death of a man to whom the poet seems to have been bound by the tenderest friendship, Thomas Shepard, minister of the church in Charlestown, a man of great gifts and of great influence, who died in December, 1677, at the age of forty-two. It was within a few days after the death of this friend, that Oakes published his elegy, — a poem in fifty-two six-lined stanzas ; not without some mechanical defects ; blurred also by some patches of the prevailing theological jargon ; yet, upon the whole, affluent, stately, pathetic ; beautiful and strong with the beauty and strength of true imaginative vision :

' Mather's Preface to Oakes's Fast Day Sermon, published 1682.

* John Sherman, in Preface to Oakes's Second Artillery-Sermon, published 1682.

• As a sermon-writer, Urian Oakes is particularly noticed in Chapter XV.

URIAN OAKES.

" Reader ! I am no poet ; but I grieve. Behold here what that passion can do, That forced a verse, without Apollo's leave, And whether the learned Sisters would or no. My griefs can hardly speak ; my sobbing muse In broken terms our sad bereavement rues. • ••••••••

Oh ! that I were a poet now in grain ! How would I invocate the Muses all To deign their presence, lend their flowing vein, And help to grace dear Shepard's funeral ! How would I paint our griefs ! and succors borrow From art and fancy, to limn out our sorrow.

Now could I wish — if wishing would obtain —

The sprightliest efforts of poetic rage.

To vent my griefs, make others feel my pain,

For this loss of the glory of our age. Here is a subject for the loftiest verse That ever waited on the bravest hearse.

And could my pen ingeniously distil The purest spirits of a sparkling wit. In rare conceits, the quintessence of skill In elegiac strains — none like to it —

I should think all too little to condole

The fatal loss to us of such a soul.

Could I take highest flights of fancy ; soar Aloft ; if wit's monopoly were mine ; All would be too low, too light, too poor. To pay due tribute to this great divine.

Ah ! wit avails not, when the heart's like to break ;

Great griefs are tongue-tied, when the lesser speak.

Away, loose-reined careers of poetry ;

The celebrated Sisters may be gone ;

We need no mourning women's elegy.

No forced, affected, artificial tone ; Great and good Shepard's dead ! Ah ! this alone Will set our eyes abroach, dissolve a stone.

Poetic raptures are of no esteem ; Daring hyperboles have here no place ;

VOU II.— 2 l8 HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Luxuriant wits on such a copious theme Would shame themselves, and blush to show their face. Here's worth enough to overmatch the skill Of the most stately Poet Laureate's quill.

As when some formidable comets blaze, As when portentous prodigies appear.

Poor mortals with amazement stand and gaze, With hearts affrighted and with trembling fear ; So are we all amaz'ed at this blow.

Sadly portending some approaching woe.

Art, nature, grace, in him were all combined, To show the world a matchless paragon ; In whom, of radiant virtues no less shined Than a whole constellation ; but he's gone ! He's gone, alas ! Down in the dust must lie As much of this rare person as could die.

If to have solid judgment, pregnant parts,

A piercing wit, and comprehensive brain ;

If to have gone the round of all the arts.

Immunity from death could gain ; Shepard would have been death-proof, and secure From that all-conquering hand, I'm very sure.

If holy life, and deeds of charity,

If grace illustrious, and virtue tried,

If modest carriage, rare humility.

Could have bribed Death, good Shepard had not died. Oh ! but inexorable Death attacks The best men, and promiscuous havoc makes.

Farewell, dear Shepard ! Thou art gone before. Made free of heaven, where thou shalt sing loud hymns Of high, triumphant praises evermore.

In the sweet choir of saints and seraphims.

My dearest, inmost, bosom-friend is gone ! Gone is my sweet companion, soul's delight I Now in an huddling crowd I'm all alone, And almost could bid all the world — Good-night. "

PETER FOLGER.

IV

Thus, we gather some notion of the sort of literary accomplishments that were imparted to the earliest men reared in the American forests ; the first growths of the highest culture to be had here in the days of the pioneers. Let us listen, now, to a man who stood for the lower forms of culture in New England in those days, its virile intelligence, its free-mindedness, the breadth of its manhood.

In the spring of 1676, while New England was absorbed in the fright and wrath of its great conflict with the Indians, there came out from the heart of the sea-mists hanging over the island of Nantucket, a clear strong voice, speaking against the one enormous sin of New England, for which, as the speaker thought, Providence was once more smiting the land with peril and pain. Peter Folger, an able and godly man, surveyor, school-master, and layassistant to Thomas Mayhew in missionary work among the Indians upon that island, felt it in him, in that hour of stress, to bear some rhymed testimony to a great principle, which then had much need of being uttered both in prose and rhyme — the principle of religious toleration. It seemed to him to be plain enough, that King Philip and his lusty scalp-fumblers were but so many cords braided into that knotted lash with which the Almighty was then scourging dreadfully, even unto the bone, the Christians of New England, for their behavior toward Christian brethren who differed from them in opinion, to wit. Baptists, Quakers, and other lovers and users of free speech. Peter Folger's testimony upon this occasion streamed forth in one long jet of manly, ungrammatical, valiant doggerel, — a ballad, just fit to be sung by " some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style," — called " A Looking-Glass for the Times ; or. The former spirit of New England revived in this generation.'*^ He asks what the sin

* Printed in 1676 ; reprinted in 1763 ; printed again in full in Duyckinck, **Cycl. Am. Lit." Simons's ed. 58-61.

20 HISTOR y OF AMERICA JV LITER A TURE.

IS, for which God is angry against them. This is his answer :

" Sure, 'tis not chiefly for those sins

That magistrates do name, And make good laws for to suppress

And execute the same.

But 'tis for that same crying sin

That rulers will not own, And that whereby much cruelty

To brethren hath been shown.

The sin of persecution

Such laws established ; By which laws they have gone so far

As blood hath touched blood."

This ballad, though without one sparkle of poetry, is great in frankness and force ; and as the author of it had seen fit to arraign and censure the mightiest personages in the land — magistrates and ministers — he nobly declined all shirking of responsibility in the affair, but just wove his name and his place of abode into the tissue of his verse, thereby notifying all who might have any issues to try with him, precisely who he was and where he was to be found, in case of need :

" I am for peace, and not for war,

And that's the reason why, I write more plain than some men do.

That use to daub and lie.

But I shall cease, and set my name

To what I here insert ; Because, to be a libeller,

I hate it with my heart.

From Sherbon town, where now I dwell.

My name I do put here ; Without offence, your real friend.