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Alexander Whitaker (search for this): chapter 2
the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon and from the islands of the Bermudas may or may not have given a hint to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in The Tempest. In either case it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker, the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present day, the style 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 f 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 settler
Church (search for this): chapter 2
s 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 pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's thrilling tale of the Lancaster massacre and her subsequent captivity, and the loud-voiced Captain Church's unvarnished description of King Philip's death. The King, shot down like a wearied bull-moose in the deep swamp, fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him. They drew him through the mud to the upland; and a doleful, great, naked dirty beast he looked like. The head brought only thirty shillings at Plymouth: scanty reward and poor encouragement, thought Captain Church. William Hubbard, the minister of Ipswich, wrote a comprehensive Narrative of the Troubles wit
John Adams (search for this): chapter 2
tter 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 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
Anne Bradstreet (search for this): chapter 2
t 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 the fascinated horror once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the future of the soul's destiny. Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England 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, o
Nathaniel Ward (search for this): chapter 2
ay 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 ofWard'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 the beginning, and the actual Indian is still found, as for three hundr
Brewster (search for this): chapter 2
ngland, begins with his voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his death, 1649. As records of an Anglo-Saxon experiment in self-government under pioneer conditions these books are priceless; as human documents, they illuminate the Puritan character; as for literary value in the narrow sense of that word, neither Bradford nor Winthrop seems to have thought of literary effect. Yet the leader of the Pilgrims has passages of grave sweetness and charm, and his sketch of his associate, Elder Brewster, will bear comparison with the best English biographical writing of that century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in tone, as he is in matter, but he writes throughout as a ruler of men should write, with decent plainness and manly freedom. His best known pages, justly praised by Tyler and other historians of American thought, contain his speech before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true liberty. No paragraphs written in America previous to the Revolution would have given mor
Thomas Gates (search for this): chapter 2
tal energy with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the vividness with which he dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen. Whether, in that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of romancing a little, no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first teller of this peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have an indulgent audience. But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William Strachey's True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon and from the islands of the Bermudas may or may not have given a hint to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in The Tempest. In either case it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker, the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present day, the style 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 fi
James Version (search for this): chapter 2
ll poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of emotions as our contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread. It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we can estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the pioneers themselves. The Bay Psalm book (1640), the first book printed in the colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of the magnificent King James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of the New England churches could sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and a pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed. Judged as hymnology or poetry, the Bay Psalm book provokes a smile. Bilt the men and women who used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with their hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem as Wigglesworth's Day of doom one must strip oneself quite free from the twen
John Smith (search for this): chapter 2
ey describe the new world, explain the present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the future. Captain John Smith's True Relation, already alluded to, is the typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager es' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have. America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith, but he owes his place in human memory today to the physical and mental energy with which he met the demands of a newvid'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 witnhusband 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
Roger Williams (search for this): chapter 2
me has become a symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams. Williams, known today as a friend of CromweWilliams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry Vane, had been exiled from Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil power had n John Cotton was perfectly logical in enlarging Roger Williams into the wilderness, but he showed less than hinsent to fight. Back and forth the books fly, for Williams loves this game. His Bloody Tenet of Persecution and this in turn provokes the torrential flood of Williams's masterpiece, The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, b But there is one sentence in a letter written by Williams in his old age to his fellow-townsmen of Providenc for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger Williams is remembered. His opponents had mightier intelabored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequoo that which separates us from the Mexican War. Roger Williams ended his much-enduring and beneficent life in
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