Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[10] identified with American thought and life, exerted an immense influence in her day, and was the ancestor of five especially intellectual families in New England, counting among her descendants William Ellery Channing, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Henry Dana, Wendell Phillips, and Andrews Norton. She was born in 1612 of Puritan stock, her father being steward of the estates of the Puritan nobleman, the Earl of Lincoln. She was married at sixteen and came to America with her husband, Governor Bradstreet, in 1630. It is evident that, in spite of her Puritan sense of duty, she could not leave England for the raw life of the colonies without a pang. “After a time,” she wrote many years later, “I changed my condition and was married, and came into this country, where I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it.” She was of delicate constitution and refined instincts, and was to become the mother of eight children. Yet most of her poems were written before she was thirty years old, in the midst of the daily toils of the wife of a New England