Page:What cheer, or, Roger Williams in banishment (1896).pdf/218

 *times written, may be its derivative; et is a termination usually denoting place. But whether this be or be not its etymology, the designation is not inapplicable, since the island must have been a place of security against the roving Maquas, Pequots, Tarrateens, &c.

STANZA LXXII.

''There Sowams gleamed,—if names the muse aright, Till in the forest far his glories fade;''

Calender intimates that Sowams is properly the name of a river, where the two Swansey rivers meet and run together for near a mile, when they empty themselves in the Narraganset Bay. Sowamset may, therefore, indicate some town or other place on the banks of the river. These names have been used by some as synonymous.

CANTO SIXTH.

STANZA III.

''Who with the laboring axe, On Seekonk's eastern marge, invades the wood?''

Nothing is said of Williams, by the histories of the age, from the time he left Salem, until his expulsion from Seekonk, after-*wards called Rehoboth. We learn, from some of Williams' letters, that, after purchasing land from Massasoit, he there built and planted, before he was informed by Governor Winslow that he was within the limits of the Plymouth patent. Until this information, he had supposed himself to be beyond the limits of either Plymouth or Massachusetts. And, certainly, the language of the Plymouth patent was sufficiently equivocal to countenance almost any construction of it in reference to the western (otherwise called southern) bounds of its grant. I will transcribe its words, that the reader may judge for himself. It grants the lands "lying between Cohasset rivulet toward the north, and Narraganset river toward the south, the great Western Ocean toward the east, and a straight line, extending into the main land toward the west, from the mouth of Narraganset