Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/162

146 To this period belongs a poetic phenomenon—a metrical horror known as "The Bay Psalm Book," being the first English book ever issued from an American printing-press. Tyler has given with his accustomed happy facility of phrase the most truthful description yet made of a production that formed for years the chief poetical reading of the average New Englander, and undoubtedly did more to lower taste and make inferior verse seem praiseworthy than any and all other causes. He writes: "In turning over these venerable pages, one suffers by sympathy something of the obvious toil of the undaunted men who, in the very teeth of nature, did all this; and whose appalling sincerity must, in our eyes, cover a multitude of such sins as sentences wrenched about end for end, clauses heaved up and abandoned in chaos, words disemboweled or split quite in two in the middle, and dissonant combinations of sound that are the despair of such poor vocal organs as are granted to human beings. The verses seem to have been hammered out on an anvil, by blows from a blacksmith's sledge. In all parts of the book is manifest the agony it cost the writers to find two words that would rhyme—more or less; and so often as this arduous feat is achieved, the poetic athlete appears to pause awhile from sheer exhaustion, panting heavily for breath. Let us now read, for our improvement, a part of the Fifty-eighth Psalm:

The wicked are estranged from the womb, they goe astray as soon as ever they are borne, uttering lyes are they. Their poyson's like serpents poyson,