Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/240

224 having died with the time that gave them birth. The romantic school had its day, and its power and charm are uncomprehended by the reader of this generation. And the Lake poets, firmly as they held the popular mind, have no place now, save in the pages where a school was forgotten and nature and stronger forces asserted their power.

No poet has enduring place whose work has not been the voice of the national thought and life in which he has had part. Theology, politics, great questions of right, all the problems of human life in any age may have, in turn, moulded the epic of the period; but, from Homer down, the poet has spoken the deepest thought of the time, and where he failed in this has failed to be heard beyond his time. With American poets, it has taken long for anything distinctively American to be born. With the early singers, there was simply a reproduction of the mannerisms and limitations of the school for which Pope had set all the copies. Why not, when it was simply a case of unchangeable indentity, the Englishman being no less an Englishman because he had suddenly been put down on the American side of the Atlantic? Then, for a generation or so, he was too busy contending with natural forces, and asserting his claims to life and place on the new continent, to have much leisure for verse-making, though here and there, in the stress of grinding days, a weak and uncertain voice sounded at times. Anne Bradstreet's, as we know, was the first, and half assured, half dismayed at her own presumption, she waited long, till convinced as other authors have since been, by the "urgency of friends," that her words must have wider spread than