Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/163

Rh they like deafe Aspe her eare that stops. Though Charmer wisely charm, his voice she will not heare. Within their mouth, doe thou their teeth, break out, O God most strong, doe thou Jehovah, the great teeth break of the lions young."

It is small wonder that Anne Bradstreet's poems struck the unhappy New Englanders who had been limited to verse of this description as the work of one who could be nothing less than the "Tenth Muse." When the first edition of her poems appeared, really in 1650, though the date is usually given as 1642, a younger generation had come upon the scene. The worst hardships were over. Wealth had accumulated, and the comfort which is the distinguishing characteristic of New England homes to-day, was well established. Harvard College was filled with bright young scholars, in whom her work awakened the keenest enthusiasm; who had insight enough to recognize her as the one shining example of poetic power in that generation, and who wrote innumerable elegies and threnodies on her life and work.

The elegy seems to have appealed more strongly to the Puritan mind than any other poetical form, and they exhausted every verbal device in perpetuating the memory of friends who scarcely needed this new terror added to a death already surrounded by a gloom that even their strongest faith hardly dispelled.

"Let groans inspire my quill," one clerical twister of language began, and another wrote with the painful and elephantine lightness which was the Puritan idea of humor, an epitaph which may serve as sufficient