Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/377

Rh Her virtues were so great, that they do raise A work to trouble fame, astonish praise. When as her Name doth but salute the ear, Men think that they perfections abstract hear. Her breast was a brave Pallace, a Broad-street, Where all heroick ample thoughts did meet, Where nature such a Tenement had tane, That others Souls, to hers, dwelt in a lane. Beneath her feet, pale envy bites her chain, And poison Malice, whetts her sting in vain. Let every Laurel, every Myrtel bough Be stript for leaves t'adorn and load her brow. Victorious wreaths, which 'cause they never fade Wise elder times for Kings and Poets made Let not her happy Memory e're lack Its worth in Fame's eternal Almanack, Which none shall read, but straight their lots deplore, And blame their Fates they were not born before. Do not old men rejoyce their Fates did last, And infants too, that theirs did make such hast, In such a welcome time to bring them forth, That they might be a witness to her worth. Who undertakes this subject to commend Shall nothing find so hard as how to end. Finis & Non,

Forty years of wedded life, and a devotion that remained unaltered to the end, inclined Simon Bradstreet to a longer period of mourning than most Puritan husbands seemed to have submitted to, but four years after her death, the husband, at seventy-three, still as hale and well-preserved as many a man of fifty, took to himself another wife.

She was the widow of Captain Joseph Gardner of Salem, killed in the attack on the Narragansett fort in December, 1675, and is described by her step-son Simon, in his diary as "a Gentl. of very good birth and education, and of great piety and Prudence." Of