Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/265

Rh regarded little more than half a century ago. Mediocrity was magnified into genius, and to have printed a book, or to have written even a tolerable poem, was a passport into the very highest society."

Even greater veneration was felt in days when many women, even of good birth, could barely write their own names, and if Anne Bradstreet had left behind her nothing but the quaternions, she would long have ranked as a poet deserving of all the elegies and anagrammatic tributes the Puritan divine loved to manufacture. The "Four Seasons," which might have been written in Lincolnshire and holds not one suggestion of the new life and methods the colonists were fast learning, may have been enjoyed because of its reminders of the old home. Certainly the "nightingale and thrush" did not sing under Cambridge windows, nor did the "primrose pale," fill the hands of the children who ran over the New England meadows. It seems to have been her theory that certain well established forms must be preserved, and so she wrote the conventional phrases of the poet of the seventeenth century, only a line or two indicating the real power of observation she failed to exercise.

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SPRING.

Another four I've left yet to bring on, Of four times four the last Quarternion, The Winter, Summer, Autumn & the Spring, In season all these Seasons I shall bring; Sweet Spring like man in his Minority, At present claim'd, and had priority. With Smiling face and garments somewhat green,