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Urian Oakes (search for this): chapter 2
hrop, by more than thirty years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to take stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize their own history and present position, to ask searching questions of themselves. You have better food and raiment than was in former times, wrote the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; but have you better hearts than your forefathers had? Thomas Walley's Languishing commonwealth maintains that Faith is dead, and love is cold, and zeal is gone. Urian Oakes's election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History, biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of that epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John Adams and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anniversary day, the Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans to a fresh recognition of the servi
Virginians (search for this): chapter 2
like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the inevitable alienation of the two races and the doom of the native. The noble savage note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his best thoughts are so intangled and enthralled. Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these naked slaves of the devil were not so simple as some have supposed. He yearned and labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and Cap
James Russell Lowell (search for this): chapter 2
ng such a popular seventeenth-century poem as Wigglesworth's Day of doom one must strip oneself quite free from the twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the chiney-corner of a Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that firelight which, as Lowell once humorously suggested, may have added a livelier relish to the poet's premonitions of eternal combustion. Lowell could afford to laugh about it, having crossed that particular black brook. But for several generations the boys and girls of NLowell could afford to laugh about it, having crossed that particular black brook. But for several generations the boys and girls of New England had read the Day of doom as if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly minister of Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion to underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best it has a trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound like clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little parson. But no living poet can move his readers to t
Thomas Jefferson (search for this): chapter 2
forefathers had? Thomas Walley's Languishing commonwealth maintains that Faith is dead, and love is cold, and zeal is gone. Urian Oakes's election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History, biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of that epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John Adams and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anniversary day, the Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans to a fresh recognition of the services wrought by the Fathers of the Republic. So it was in the colonies at the close of the seventeenth century. Old England, in one final paroxysm of political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688. That Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic struggle which began in the autocratic theories of James the First and in the absolutism of
Pocahontas (search for this): chapter 2
he frontier fringe of our civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like Parkman, poets like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the inevitable alienation of the two races and the doom of the native. The noble savage note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his best thoughts are so intangled and enthralled. Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these naked slaves of the devil were not so simple as some have supposed. He yearned and labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim settlers resol
German (search for this): chapter 2
nd and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today the inevitable outcome of her own experience in the New World. For readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in England by Bishop Hall and Donne, there is The simple Cobbler of Agawam written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a dozen years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely more American than the satire upon German professors in Sartor Resartus is German. Like Charles Dickens's American notes, Ward's give the reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of the sights and the talk and the personages of the transatlantic world. Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives of struggles with the Indians. The image of the bloody savage has always hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys and girls have played Indian from
Edward Johnson (search for this): chapter 2
alled. Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these naked slaves of the devil were not so simple as some have supposed. He yearned and labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in the storming and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as piously relentless as anything in the Old Testament. Cromwell at Drogheda, not long after, had soldiers no more merciless than these exterminating Puritans, who wished to plough their fields henceforth in peace. A generation later the storm broke again in King Philip's War. Its tales of massacre, captivity, and single-handed fighting linger in the American imagination still. Typical
George Sandys (search for this): chapter 2
of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of the savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness and starvation, watched by those wild and cruel Pagans. John Pory, of the strong potations, who thinks that good company is the soul of this life, nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the crystal rivers and odoriferous woods by reflecting that he is escaping envy and expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace during a Virginia exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a somewhat later day, since he speaks of having read Mr. Smith's travels, draws the long bow of narrative quite as powerfully as the redoubtable Smith, and far more smoothly, as witness his accounts of starvation on shipboard and cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is an artist who would have delighted Stevenson. All of these
Jesus Christ (search for this): chapter 2
s Shepard, another graduate of Emmanuel College in the old Cambridge, who became the soul-melting preacher of the newer Cambridge by the Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. He thinks the truth is a poor mean thing in itself and that the human reason cannot be the last resolution of all doubts, which must be sought only in the written Word of God. He holds it a tough work, a wonderful hard matter to be saved. Jesus Christ is not got with a wet finger. Yet, like so many mystics, he yearns to be covered with God, as with a cloud, to be drowned, plunged, and swallowed up with God. One hundred years later we shall find this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan Edwards. John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial pulpit, owes his fame more to his social and political influence than to his literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like Hooker and S
Thomas Walley (search for this): chapter 2
in the flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to take stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize their own history and present position, to ask searching questions of themselves. You have better food and raiment than was in former times, wrote the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; but have you better hearts than your forefathers had? Thomas Walley's Languishing commonwealth maintains that Faith is dead, and love is cold, and zeal is gone. Urian Oakes's election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History, biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of that epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John Adams and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon th
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