Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/148

132 And plant our name Under that star Not known unto our north.

And as there plenty grows Of laurel everywhere— Apollo's sacred tree— You, it may see, A poet's brows to crown That may sing there."

The men who, in passing over to America could not cease to be Englishmen, were the friends and associates—the intellectual equals in many points of this extraordinary assemblage of brilliant and audacious intellects; and chief among them was the man at whose name we are all inclined to smile—Captain John Smith. So many myths have hid the real man from view—some of them, it must be admitted, of his own making—that we forget how vivid and resolute a personality he owned, and the pride we may well have in him as the writer of the first distinctively American book. His work was not only for Virginia, but for New England as well. His life was given to the interests of both. Defeated plans, baffled hopes, had no power to quench the absorbing love that filled him to the end, and, at the very last, he wrote of the American colonies: "By that acquaintance I have with them, I call them my children; for they have been my wife, my hawks, hounds, my cards, my dice, and, in total, my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my left hand to my right."

Certain qualities, most prominent then, have, after a long disappearance, become once more, in degree at least, characteristic of the time. The book man of