Anne Bradstreet and Her Time Part 13

Such conversations as did take place had a double zest from the fact that the sharp-eyed herdsman was outwitted, but as a rule the small Puritans obeyed orders and the spinners and knitters in the sun, helped to fill the family chests which did duty as bureaus, and three varieties of which are still to be seen in old houses on the Cape, as well as in the Museum at Plymouth. The plain sea- chest, like the sailor's chest of to-day, was the property of all alike, and usually of solid oak. A grade above this, came another form, with turned and applied ornaments and two drawers at the bottom, a fine specimen of which is still in the old Phillips house at North Andover, opposite the Bradstreet house. The last variety had more drawers, but still retained the lid on top, which being finally permanently fastened down, made the modern bureau.

High-backed wooden chairs and an immense oaken table with folding ladder legs, furnished the living-room, settles being on either side of the wide chimney, where, as the children roasted apples or chestnuts, they listened to stories of the wolves, whose howl even then might still be heard about the village. There are various references to "wolf-hooks" in Governor Bradstreet's accounts, these being described by Josselyn as follows:

"Four mackerel hooks are bound with brown thread and wool wrapped around them, and they are dipped into melted tallow till they be as big and round as an egg. This thing thus prepared is laid by some dead carcase which toles the wolves. It is swallowed by them and is the means of their being taken."

Every settler believed that "the fangs of a wolf hung about children's necks keep them from frightning, and are very good to rub their gums with when they are breeding of teeth." It was not at all out of character to look on complacently while dogs worried an unhappy wolf, the same Josselyn writing of one taken in a trap: "A great mastiff held the wolf . . . Tying him to a stake we bated him with smaller doggs and had excellent sport; but his hinder leg being broken, they knocked out his brains."

To these hunts every man and boy turned out, welcoming the break in the monotonous life, and foxes and wolves were shot by the dozen, their method being to "lay a sledg-load of cods-heads on the other side of a paled fence when the moon shines, and about nine or ten of the clock, the foxes come to it; sometimes two or three or half a dozen and more; these they shoot, and by that time they have cased them there will be as many more; so they continue shooting and killing of foxes as long as the moon shineth."

Road-making became another means of bringing them together for something besides religious services, and as baskets of provisions were taken with the workers, and the younger boys were allowed to share in the lighter part of the work, a suggestion of merry- making was there also. These roads were often changed, being at no time much more than paths marked by the blazing of trees and the clearing away of timber and undergrowth. There were no bridges save over the narrower streams, fording being the custom, till ferries were established at various points. Roads and town boundaries were alike undetermined and shifting. "Preambulators,"

otherwise surveyors, found their work more and more complicated.

"Marked trees, stakes and stones," were not sufficient to prevent endless discussions between selectmen and surveyors, and there is a doc.u.ment still on file which shows the straits to which the unhappy "preambulators" were sometimes reduced.

"To Ye Selectmen of Billerica: Loving friends and neighbors, we have bine of late under such surcomstances that wee could not tell whether wee had any bounds or no between our towne, but now we begine to think we have--this therefore are to desier you to send some men to meet with ours upon the third Munday of ye next month by nine a'clock in ye morning, if it be a faire day, if not the next drie day, and so to run one both side of the river and to meet at the vesil place and the west side of ye river."

There were heart burnings from another source than this, and one which could never be altered by selectmen, whether at home or abroad. For generations, no person was allowed to choose a seat in church, a committee, usually the magistrates, settling the places of all. In the beginning, after the building of any meeting-house, the seats were all examined and ranked according to their desirability, this process being called, "dignifying the pews."

All who held the highest social or ecclesiastical positions were then placed; and the rest as seemed good, the men on one side, the women on another, and the children, often on a low bench outside the pews, where they were kept in order by the t.i.thing man, who, at the first symptom of wandering attention, rapped them over the head with his hare's foot mounted on a stick, and if necessary, withdrew them from the scene long enough for the administration of a more thorough discipline.

There are perpetual complaints of partiality--even hints that bribery had been at work in this "seating the meeting-house," and the committee chosen found it so disagreeable a task that Dudley Bradstreet, when in due time his turn came to serve, protested against being compelled to it, and at last revolted altogether.

At Boston a cage had been set up for Sabbath-breakers, but Andover found easier measures sufficient, though there are constant offences recorded. A smile in meeting brought admonishment, and a whisper, the stocks, and when the boys were ma.s.sed in the galleries the t.i.thing man had active occupation during the entire service, and could have had small benefit of the means of grace.

Two were necessary at last, the records reading: "We have ordered Thomas Osgood and John Bridges to have inspection over the boys in the galleries on the Sabbath, that they might be contained in order in the time of publick exercise."

Later, even worse trouble arose. The boys would not be "contained,"

and the anxious selectmen wrote: "And whereas there is grevious complaints of great prophaneness of ye Sabbath, both in y time of exercise, at noon time, to ye great dishonor of G.o.d, scandall of religion, & ye grief of many serious Christians, by young persons, we order & require ye tything-men & constables to tak care to p'vent such great and shamefull miscarriages, which are soe much observed and complained of."

The little Bradstreets, chilled to the bone by sitting for hours in the fireless church, could rush home to the warm hearth and the generous b.u.t.tery across the street, but many who had ridden miles, and who ate a frosty lunch between services may be pardoned for indulging in the "great and shameful miscarriages," which were, undoubtedly, a rush across the pews or a wrestle on the meeting- house steps. Even their lawlessness held more circ.u.mspectness than is known to the most decorous boy of to-day, and it gained with every generation, till neither t.i.thing-men nor constables had further power to restrain it, the Puritans of the eighteenth century wailing over the G.o.dlessness and degeneracy of the age as strenuously as the pessimists of the nineteenth. Even for the seventeenth there are countless infractions of law, and a study of court records would leave the impression of a reckless and utterly defiant community, did not one recall the fact that life was so hedged about with minute detail, that the most orderly citizen of this day would have been the disorderly one of that.

One resource, of entertainment, was always open to Puritan households. Hospitality was on a scale almost of magnificence, and every opportunity seized for making a great dinner or supper, the abundant good cheer of which was their strongest reminder of England. The early privations were ended, but to recall them gave an added zest, and we may fancy Roger Clap repeating the experience found in his memoir, with a devout thankfulness that such misery was far behind them.

"Bread was so scarce, that frequently I thought the very crusts of my father's table would have been very sweet unto me. And when I could have meal and water and salt boiled together who could wish better. It was not accounted a strange thing in those days to drink water, and to eat samp or hominy without b.u.t.ter or milk.

Indeed it would have been strange to see a piece of roast beef, mutton or veal, though it was not long before there was roast goat."

Generous living had become the colonial characteristic. Even in the first years, while pressure was still upon them, and supplies chiefly from England, one of them wrote:

"Sometimes we used bacon and b.u.t.tered pease, sometimes b.u.t.tered bag pudding, made with currants and raisins, sometimes drinked pottage of beer and oatmeal, and sometimes water pottage well b.u.t.tered."

Health had come to many who had been sickly from childhood. In fact, in spite of the theory we are all inclined to hold, that "the former days were better than these," and our ancestors men and women of a soundness and vigor long since lost, there is every proof that the standard of health has progressed with all other standards, and that the best blood of this generation is purer and less open to disorder than the best blood of that. Francis Higginson may stand as the representative of many who might have written with him:

"Whereas I have for divers years past been very sickly and ready to cast up whatsoever I have eaten, . . . He hath made my coming to be a method to cure me of a wonderful weak stomach and continual pain of melancholy mind from the spleen."

His children seem to have been in equally melancholy case, but he was able after a year or two of New England life to write:

"Here is an extraordinary clear and dry air, that is of a most healing nature to all such as are of a cold, melancholy, phlegmatic, rheumatic temper of body."

The Puritans, as life settled into a less rasping routine than that of the early years, grew rotund and comfortable in expression, and though the festivities of training days, and the more solemn one of ordination or Thanksgiving day, meant sermon and prayers of doubled length, found this only an added element of enjoyment. Judge Sewall's diary records many good dinners; sometimes as "a sumptuous feast," sometimes as merely "a fine dinner," but always with impressive unction. At one of these occasions he mentions Governor Bradstreet as being present and adds that he "drank a gla.s.s or two of wine, eat some fruit, took a pipe of tobacco in the New Hall, wished me joy of the house and desired our prayers."

At Andover he was equally ready for any of these diversions, though never intemperate in either meat or drink, but, like every magistrate, he kept open house, and enjoyed it more than some whose austerity was greater, and there are many hints that Mistress Bradstreet provided good cheer with a freedom born of her early training, and made stronger by her husband's tastes and wishes. The Andover dames patterned after her, and spent many of the long hours, in as close following of honored formulas as the new conditions allowed, laying then the foundation for that reputation still held by Andover housewives, and derided by one of her best known daughters, as "the cup-cake tendencies of the town."

CHAPTER XI.

A FIRST EDITION.

Though the ma.n.u.script of the first edition of Anne Bradstreet's poems was nearly if not entirely complete before the removal to Andover, some years were still to pa.s.s before it left her hands entirely, though her brother-in-law, knowing her self-distrustful nature, may have refused to give it up when possession had once been obtained. But no event in her life save her marriage, could have had quite the same significance to the shy and shrinking woman, who doubted herself and her work alike, considering any real satisfaction in it a temptation of the adversary. Authorship even to-day has its excitements and agitations, for the maker of the book if not for its readers. And it is hardly possible to measure the interest, the profound absorption in the book, which had been written chiefly in secret in hours stolen from sleep, to ensure no trenching on daylight duties. We are helpless to form just judgment of what the little volume meant to the generation in which it appeared, simply because the growth of the critical faculty has developed to an abnormal degree, and we demand in the lightest work, qualities that would have made an earlier poet immortal.

This is an age of versification. The old times--when a successful couplet had the same prominence and discussion as a walking match to-day; when one poet thought his two lines a satisfactory morning's work, and another said of him that when such labor ended, straw was laid before the door and the knocker tied up--are over, once for all. Now and then a poet stops to polish, but for the most part spontaneity, fluency, gush, are the qualities demanded, and whatever finish may be given, must be dominated by these more apparent facts. Delicate fancies still abound, and are more and more the portion of the many; but Fancy fills the place once held for Imagination, a statelier and n.o.bler dame, deaf to common voices and disdaining common paths. Every country paper, every petty periodical, holds verse that in the Queen Anne period in literature would have given the author permanent place and name. All can rhyme, and many can rhyme melodiously. The power of words fitly set has made itself known, and a word has come to be judged like a note in music--as a potential element of harmony--a sound that in its own place may mean any emotion of joy or sorrow, hate or love. Whether a thought is behind these alluring rhythms, with their sensuous swing or their rush of sound, is immaterial so long as the ear has satisfaction; thus Swinburne and his school fill the place of Spenser and the elder poets, and many an "idle singer of an empty day" jostles aside the masters, who can wait, knowing that sooner or later, return to them is certain.

Schools have their power for a time, and expression held in their moulds forgets that any other form is possible. But the throng who copied Herrick are forgotten, their involved absurdities and conceits having died with the time that gave them birth. The romantic school had its day, and its power and charm are uncomprehended by the reader of this generation. And the Lake poets, firmly as they held the popular mind, have no place now, save in the pages where a school was forgotten and nature and stronger forces a.s.serted their power.

No poet has enduring place whose work has not been the voice of the national thought and life in which he has had part. Theology, politics, great questions of right, all the problems of human life in any age may have, in turn, moulded the epic of the period; but, from Homer down, the poet has spoken the deepest thought of the time, and where he failed in this has failed to be heard beyond his time. With American poets, it has taken long for anything distinctively American to be born. With the early singers, there was simply a reproduction of the mannerisms and limitations of the school for which Pope had set all the copies. Why not, when it was simply a case of unchangeable ident.i.ty, the Englishman being no less an Englishman because he had suddenly been put down on the American side of the Atlantic? Then, for a generation or so, he was too busy contending with natural forces, and a.s.serting his claims to life and place on the new continent, to have much leisure for verse-making, though here and there, in the stress of grinding days, a weak and uncertain voice sounded at times. Anne Bradstreet's, as we know, was the first, and half a.s.sured, half dismayed at her own presumption, she waited long, till convinced as other authors have since been, by the "urgency of friends,"

that her words must have wider spread than ma.n.u.script could give them. Now and again it is a.s.serted that the ma.n.u.script for the first edition was taken to London without her knowledge and printed in the same way, but there is hardly the slightest ground for such conclusion, while the elaborate dedication and the many friendly tributes included, indicate the fullest knowledge and preparation. All those whose opinion she most valued are represented in the opening pages of the volume.

Evidently they felt it necessary to justify this extraordinary departure from the proper sphere of woman, a sphere as sharply defined and limited by every father, husband and brother, as their own was left uncriticised and unrestrained. Nathaniel Ward forgot his phillipics against the "squirrel's brains" of women, and hastened to speak his delight in the little book, and Woodbridge and John Rogers and sundry others whose initials alone are affixed to their prose or poetical tributes and endors.e.m.e.nts, all banded together to sustain this first venture. The t.i.tle page follows the fashion of the time, and is practically an abstract of what follows.

THE TENTH MUSE,

LATELY SPRUNG UP IN AMERICA,

OR

_Severall Poems, compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of Delight, wherein especially is contained a Compleat discourse, and Description of_

( ELEMENTS, ( CONSt.i.tUTIONS, THE FOUR--( AGES OF MAN, ( SEASONS OF THE YEAR.

_Together with an Exact Epitomie of the Four Monarchies, viz.:_ ( a.s.sYRIAN, THE ( PERSIAN, ( GRECIAN, ( ROMAN.

_Also, a Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the Late Troubles; with divers other pleasant and serious Poems._

BY A GENTLEWOMAN IN THOSE PARTS.

Printed at London for Stephen Bowtell at the signe of the Bible in Popes Head-Alley, 1650.

Whether Anne herself wrote the preface is uncertain. It is apologetic enough for one of her supporters, but has some indications that she chose the first word should be her own.

KIND READER:

Had I opportunity but to borrow some of the Author's wit, 'tis possible I might so trim this curious work with such quaint expressions, as that the Preface might bespeak thy further Perusal; but I fear 'twill be a shame for a Man that can speak so little, to be seen in the t.i.tle-page of this Woman's Book, lest by comparing the one with the other, the Reader should pa.s.s his sentence that it is the gift of women not only to speak most, but to speak best; I shall leave therefore to commend that, which with any ingenious Reader will too much commend the Author, unless men turn more peevish than women, to envy the excellency of the inferiour s.e.x. I doubt not but the Reader will quickly find more than I can say, and the worst effect of his reading will be unbelief, which will make him question whether it be a woman's work and aske, "Is it possible?"

If any do, take this as an answer from him that dares avow it: It is the Work of a Woman, honoured, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanour, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her Family occasions, and more than so, these Poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments. I dare adde but little lest I keep thee too long; if thou wilt not believe the worth of these things (in their kind) when a man sayes it, yet believe it from a woman when thou seest it. This only I shall annex, I fear the displeasure of no person in the publishing of these Poems but the Author, without whose knowledg, and contrary to her expectation, I have presumed to bring to publick view, what she resolved in such a manner should never see the Sun; but I found that diverse had gotten some Scattered Papers, and affected them well, were likely to have sent forth broken pieces, to the Authors predjudice, which I thought to prevent, as well as to pleasure those that earnestly desired the view of the whole.