Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/247

Rh How Air and Earth no correspondence hold, And yet in equal tempers, how they 'gree How divers natures make one Unity Something of all (though mean) I did intend But fear'd you'ld judge Du Bartas was my friend. I honour him, but dare not wear his wealth My goods are true (though poor) I love no stealth But if I did I durst not send them you Who must reward a Thief, but with his due. I shall not need, mine innocence to clear These ragged lines will do 't when they appear; On what they are, your mild aspect I crave Accept my best, my worst vouchsafe a Grave. From her that to your self, more duty owes Then water in the boundess Ocean flows.

The reference in the second line, to "your four Sisters, clothed in black and white," is to a poem which the good governor is said to have written in his later days, "on the Four Parts of the World," but which a happy fate has spared us, the manuscript having been lost or destroyed, after his death. His daughter's verse is often as dreary, but both dedication and prologue admit her obligations to du Bartas, and that her verse was modeled upon his was very plain to Nathaniel Ward, who called her a "right du Bartas girl," with the feeling that such imitation was infinitely more creditable to her than any originality which she herself carefully disclaims in the

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1 To sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings, Of cities founded, Commonwealths begun, For my mean pen are too superior things: Or how they all, or each their dates have run