Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/210

194 ground, the stranger will swear that there is not a street, called, or deserving to be called, straight, in all its borders. But this was of even less consequence then than now. The New England woman has never walked when she could ride, and so long as the church stood within easy distance, demanded nothing more. One walk of Anne Bradstreets' is recorded in a poem, and it is perhaps because it was her first, that it made so profound an impression, calling out, as we shall presently see, some of the most natural and melodious verse which her serious and didactic Muse ever allowed her, and being still a faithful picture of the landscape it describes. But up to the beginning of the Andover life, Nature had had small chance of being either seen or heard, for an increasing family, the engrossing cares of a new settlement, and the Puritan belief that "women folk were best indoors," shut her off from influences that would have made her work mean something to the present day. She had her recreations as well as her cares, and we need now to discover just what sort of life she and the Puritan sisterhood in general led in the first years, whose "new manners and customs," so disturbed her conservative spirit.