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

[13]
The stones and trees, insensible of time,
Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen.
If winter come, and greenness then do fade,
A Spring returns, and they more youthful made;
But Man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid.
...

Shall I then praise the heavens, the trees, the earth,
Because their beauty and their strength last longer?
Shall I wish there, or never, to had birth,
Because they're bigger and their bodies stronger?
Nay, they shall darken, perish, fade, and die,
And when unmade so ever shall they lie;
But man was made for endless immortality.
...

O Time, the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivion's curtains over kings;
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
Their names without a record are forgot,
Their parts, their ports, their pomp's all laid in tha dust,
Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings 'scape time's rust;
But he whose name is grav'd in the white stone
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.

Anne Bradstreet had the most genuinely poetic gift among our Puritan writers of verse. These formed, however, a surprisingly large class. “Lady Mary Montagu said that in England, in her time, verse-making had become as common as taking snuff; in New England, in the age before that, it had become much more common than taking snuff ”