Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/169

Rh which at once buried itself in the cares of a country pastorate and gave no further sign of gift or wish to speak in verse. The poem records the fate of a gifted classmate, who graduated with him at Harvard, sailed for England, and dying on the return voyage, was buried at sea. It is a passionate lamentation, an appeal to Death, and at last a quiet resignation to the inevitable, the final lines having a music and a pathos seldom found in the crabbed New England verse:

With him the eighteenth century opens, beyond which we have no present interest, such literary development as made part of Anne Bradstreet's knowledge ending with the seventeenth.