Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/199

Rh, the need of expression gradually died out, and only occasional verses for special occasions, seem to have been written. The quiet, busy life, her own ill-health, and her absorption in her children, all silenced her, and thus, the work that her ripened thought and experience might have made of some value to the world, remained undone. The religious life became more and more the only one of any value to her, and she may have avoided indulgence in favorite pursuits, as a measure against the Adversary whose temptations she recorded. Our interest at present is in these first Andover years, and the course of life into which the little community settled, the routine holding its own interpretation of the silence that ensued. The first sharp bereavement had come, a year or so before the move was absolutely determined upon, Mrs. Dudley dying late in December of 1643, at Roxbury, to which they had moved in 1639, and her epitaph as written by her daughter Anne, shows what her simple virtues had meant for husband and children.

AN EPITAPH

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MRS. DOROTHY DUDLEY,

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Here lyes A worthy Matron of unspotted life, A loving Mother and obedient wife, A friendly Neighbor pitiful to poor, Whom oft she fed and clothed with her store, To Servants wisely aweful but yet kind, And as they did so they reward did find; A true Instructer of her Family,