Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/147

Rh before authorship could become the business of any, not even the clergy being excepted from the stress of hard manual labor.

Yet, for the first departure, an enthusiasm of hope and faith filled many hearts. The England of that day had not been too kindly toward her men of letters, who were then, as now, also men of dreams, looking for something better than the best she had to offer, and who, in the early years of the seventeenth century, gathered in London as the centre least touched by the bigotry and narrowness of one party, the wild laxity and folly of the other. "The very air of London must have been electric with the daily words of those immortals whose casual talk upon the pavement by the street-side was a coinage of speech richer, more virile, more expressive than has been known on this planet since the great days of Athenian poetry, eloquence and mirth." There were "wits, dramatists, scholars, orators, singers, philosophers." For every one of them was the faith of something undefined, yet infinitely precious, to be born of all the mysterious influences in that new land to which all eyes turned, and old Michael Drayton's ringing ode on their departure held also a prophecy:

In kenning of the shore, Thanks to God first given, O you, the happiest men, Be frolic then; Let cannons roar, Frighting the wide heaven.

And in regions far Such heroes bring ye forth As those from whom we came;