Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/198

182 quiet composure and patience and his forgiving temper. He seems to have yearned for England, and this desire was probably increased by his connection with the Dudley family. Anne Bradstreet's sympathies, in spite of all her theories and her determined acceptance of the Puritan creed, were still monarchical, and Mercy would naturally share them. Dudley himself never looked back, but the "gentlewoman of fortune" whom he married, was less content, and her own hidden longing showed itself in her children. Friends urged the young preacher to return, which he did in 1647, leaving wife and children behind him, his pastorate having lasted but a year. There is a letter of Dudley's, written in 1648, addressed to him as "preacher of the word of God at Andover in Wiltshire," and advising him of what means should be followed to send his wife and children, but our chief interest in him lies in the fact, that he carried with him the manuscript of Anne Bradstreet's poems, which after great delay, were published at London in 1650. He left her a quiet, practically unknown woman, and returned in 1662, to find her as widely praised as she is now forgotton; the "Tenth Muse, Lately sprung up in America."

What part of them were written in Andover there is no means of knowing, but probably only a few of the later ones, not included in the first edition. The loneliness and craving of her Ipswich life, had forced her to composition as a relief, and the major part of her poems were written before she was thirty years old, and while she was still hampered by the methods of the few she knew as masters. With the settling at Andover and the satisfying companionship of her