chgoers, passing hours upon hours every week in rapt
absorption with the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of
their chief book, the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty
of words and the sweep of emotions as our contemporaries upon whose
book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread.

It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we
can estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the pioneers
themselves. The "Bay Psalm Book" (1640), the first book printed in the
colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of the magnificent King
James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of
the New England churches could sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and
a pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed.
Judged as hymnology or poetry, the Bay "Psalm Book" provokes a smile.
But the men and women who used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with
their hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem
as Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom" one must strip oneself quite free from
the twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the chimney-corner
of a Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that firelight which, as Lowell
once humorously suggested, may have added a "livelier relish" to the
poet's "premonitions of eternal combustion." Lowell could afford to
laugh about it, having crossed that particular black brook. But for
several generations the boys and girls of New England had read the "Day
of Doom" as if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly minister
of Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion to
underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best it has a
trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound
like clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have
imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little
parson. But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror
once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless
gaze into the future of the soul's destiny.

Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other
verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance,
are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic
themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the
daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet,
chose to imitate the more