was the author of two poems of considerable length: one, "God's Controversy with New England," written at the time of the great drought of 1662, in a style that can be guessed at; the other, "Meat out of the Eater," in which, to quote Prof. Tyler, "we have simply the Christian doctrine of comfort in sorrow, translated into metrical jingles." The latter was a very popular production, and contained at least one spark of poetry:

War ends in peace, and morning light
Mounts upon midnight's wing.

More than a single spark of poetry can be found in "A Funeral Song," which one of Wigglesworth's sons, Samuel by name, wrote when a youth of twenty to commemorate the death of a friend, Nathaniel Clarke, who died at sea.' Prof. Tyler deserves thanks for having laid stress on the beauty of the closing stanzas of this poem, which are certainly touching. Whether young Wigglesworth would have developed into a poet if he had given his fancy free wing, instead of settling down into the routine life of a country parson, is, of course, a matter of unimportant speculation. But surely the gentle son should be remembered along with the father, who has enveloped his equally gentle nature in such a sulphurous halo.

The fact that Cotton Mather preached Wigglesworth's funeral sermon and wrote his epitaph reminds us that we have come full upon that portentous figure and his still more portentous "Magnalia." It is only as a poet and as a collector of the poetical remains of other divines that we can here reckon with this Charlemagne of the Mather dynasty. Elegiac and encomiastic verse was, of course, his forte, and some of it is curiously simple, considering the usually turgid character of his piety and his scholarship. The stanzas on his son and daughter are totally void of conceit, and the

1 It is curious to notice how the death of friends at sea has inspired elegiac poets. Archilochus, Propertius, Milton, Wigglesworth, is a queer list, to which such names as those of Turberville, William Browne of Tavistock, and others can easily be added.

couplets on his wife, Abigail, are admirably lucid and sincere. They do not rise into the sphere of pure poetry, as does the epitaph on Bacon, but they charm in a negative way by their utter lack of the rotund extravagance and bathos of the typical memorial verse of the period-such verse, for example, as Mather himself wrote to embalm the memories of John Wilson and William Thompson; such verse, also, as Nicholas Noyes wrote upon the death of the same Mrs. Abigail Mather. Noyes, however, had a certain amount of originality and quaintness of expression that makes him more readable than many of his brother bards. These lines, from the "Consolatory Poem" to Cotton Mather, are not unamusing:

Where canker'd breasts with envy broil,

And smooth tongues are but dipt in oil;
And Cain's club only doth lie by
For want of opportunity.

Yea, who would live among catarrhs,
Contagions, pains, and strifes, and wars,
That might go up above the stars,
And live in health, and peace, and bliss,
Had in that world, but wish'd in this?

Noyes seems to have been a sort of past master in the fastdecaying art of writing punning elegies. His lines on Rev. Joseph Green are a model of their happily defunct kind. He was also among the poets who complimented Mather on his "Magnalia,' as was our native-born bard, Benjamin Thompson, as well as Timothy Woodbridge, the brother of Cotton's eulogist. Other occasional poets of the period are; Daniel Gookin, Jr., who lamented Urian Oakes; Mrs. Sarah Kemble Knight, who dropped into verse in her "Journals; Judge Samuel Sewall, the diarist, whose "Hymn for the New Year" (1701) has the merit of simplicity; and finally, without any attempt to exhaust them, John Hawkins, who has the following good epigram attributed to him and inspired by Providence:

Lord, are not ravens daily fed by thee?

And wilt thou clothe the lilies, and not me?
Begone distrust, I shall have clothes and bread
While lilies flourish and the birds are fed.

An occasional poet is, perhaps, all that we can call Ebenezer Cook, who in his "Sot-Weed Factor" (1708) satirized the commercial shrewdness of the Quakers and the administration of the law in Maryland. Nothing whatever is known of this satirist, who nevertheless had a little Hudibrastic humor, which, lest it should go begging, is thrown in here to help out the New England stock. Equally unknown is the author of the popular ballad entitled "Lovewell's Fight; but it is easy to see that even had the production of ballads in New England gone on in geometrical progression, the time needed for the evolution of an "Iliad," or even a "Chevy Chase," would have been about equal in extent to the æons needed, as astronomers tell us, in order to transmit to this little world of ours the light of some of the fixed stars. It is uncertain whether it was the recognition of this fact that prompted Major General, Chief Justice, and Governor Roger Wolcott, of Connecticut, to write an artificial epic on the obtaining of a charter for his native colony by John Winthrop the Younger. He modestly called it "A Brief Account," and had the grace to keep it in manuscript, his only published work in verse being a worthless volume of "Meditations." It is, however, indisputable that this poem (for the possession of which our thanks are due to the Massachusetts Historical Society) marks the fact that the influence of Alexander Pope had come to America to make a long sojourn. Indeed, an acquaintance of Pope's, and the author of a commendatory poem upon his work, was even now living at Watertown in the person of Francis Knapp. Pope's influence has been responsible for a good deal of sad stuff in the way of metrical composition, but for nothing worse than the long speech in Wolcott's poem, in which Winthrop ascribes to Charles II. the planting and early history of Connecticut. What is one to say of a poet who makes a ship's captain, during the approach of a storm, exclaim to his crew?

Now all from safe recumbency arise!

Or what is one to say of the propriety of this speech made by an Indian chief to the first invaders of his soil?

Now drop your anchors and unbend your sails;
And if for peace and friendship you are come,
And do desire this land shall be your home,
Let some of your chief leaders come to land,

And now with me join their right hand to hand.

But not even these charming touches, not even the classical
allusions, not even the remarkable similes introduced by our
author, can equal his description of Mason's assault upon
the Indian village in the Pequot War.
Witness these lines,
with which we may well take leave of Wolcott:

After so many deaths and dangers past,
Mason was thoroughly enflam'd at last;
He snatched a blazing bavin with his hand,
And fir'd the stately palace with the brand.
And soon the towering and rapacious flame
All hope of opposition overcame.
Eurus and Notus readily subjoin

The town, its wealth, high battlements and spires,
Now sinketh, weltering in conjoining fires.

But we are fortunately able to complete this sketch of the poetry of the Plantations with pleasanter figures than Roger Wolcott. We can actually afford to linger for a moment over the serious verses of Mrs. Jane Turell and her father and of Rev. John Adams, even if the humorous skits of John Seccomb demand no further notice than the statement that their publication in England can have done no good to the literary reputation of infant America.1

Mrs. Jane Turell was the only daughter of Rev. Dr. Benjamin Coleman, himself the author, among other verses, of a poem on Elijah's translation, in which he unconsciously sounded the praises of Alexander Pope by imitating him, while consciously sounding the praises of Rev. Samuel Willard by coupling his name with that of the prophet. His daughter Jane inherited his poetical talents, and, like him, chose scriptural subjects and owned the sway of Pope. She

1See his doggerel "Father Abbey's Will" in 2 Stedman-Hutchinson.

was catholic enough, too, to admire Waller, on whom she wrote a glowing eulogy, praising his politics as well as his poetry, which is remarkable in a fair Puritan, and she even went so far as to apostrophize Sir Richard Blackmore as follows:

Blackmore, thou wondrous bard! whose name inspires
My glowing breast to imitate thy fires.

One feels a sympathy with Mrs. Bradstreet, laboring under the influence of Sylvester; what must one not feel for an amiable young woman laboring under the influence of Blackmore? It is true that in one of her poems she expresses the wish to burn with Sappho's "noble fire" ("but not like her for faithless man expire"), and to rival great "Orinda's fame;" but it is to be feared that her intimacy with Blackmore has brought a blight upon her and her works. Her life, at any rate, was exemplary, and, although she died early, she did not expire on account of any faithless man, for her husband, Rev. Ebenezer Turell, published her memoirs and poetical remains the very year she died (1735).

Rev. John Adams is connected with her fame through his lines "To the Rev. Mr. Turell, on the Death of His Virtuous Consort." His verses are neither above nor below the typical couplets of the period, nor do his other poems give us any impression concerning their author save that he had a facility for versifying and moralizing. He was a clergyman at Newport, R. I., and was pious enough to write an "Address to the Supreme Being for His Assistance in my Poetical Compositions." The divine help is not very apparent in his work to our profane modern eyes, unless it be in the choice of the book of Revelation as a subject for paraphrase, to which we are, however, heathen enough to prefer Mr. Adams's translation of the First Ode of Horace.

Another divine of eighteenth-century New England, a very different sort of man from the quiet and scholarly John Adams, is the famous punster Mather Byles, who, while falling in part outside our period (he died in 1788, in his eightysecond year), nevertheless as a serious bard falls to our lot. Byles, as Prof. Tyler has well shown, was much more than