like the historian's snakes in Ireland: there were n't any. As the first satirist, and not the worst, of the colony, Nathaniel Ward, the Simple Cobbler of Agawam, declared: Poetry's a gift wherein but few excel, He doth very ill, that doth not passing well. Enough has been quoted from the primitive verse-makers to show that none of them did passing well; but enough also has been said, I trust, to show that some acquaintance with their spirit is a profitable, almost a necessary, preparation for approaching that fine and ephemeral thing, the flowering of New England in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is rather the fashion, I am aware, among a certain coterie of enlightened critics to condemn the later poetry of New England as almost equally negligible with that of the men and women we have been considering. And indeed no rightly informed person will rank the outpourings of Concord and Cambridge with the supreme creations of the older centres of civilization. We are not likely to fall into that error of over-praise; but we may be tempted by the clamour of our emancipated youth, hailing largely from strange lands in the dark map of Europe, to miss the more fragile beauty of what after all is the fairest thing this country has is one of the very desirable possessions of the world, and not to appreciate it is to prove one's self dulled and vulgarized by the strident conceit of modernity. It is limited no doubt, and for reasons which I have tried to set forth. But limitation is not always and altogether a vice. At least out of the limitations fixed by the origin of New England grew the peculiar attitude of the later writers towards nature, the charm of their portrayal of the less passionate affections of the home and the family, the absence of erotic appeal, the depth and sincerity, but the perilous independence also, of their religious intuition, the invincible rightness of their character. We may laugh as we will at old Wigglesworth and at the asthmatic Muse of the other Puritan divines; they have been justified of their children. JONATHAN EDWARDS JONATHAN EDWARDS was born at Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703. He belonged, unlike his great contemporary Franklin in this, to the "Brahmin families" of America, his father being a distinguished graduate of Harvard and a minister of high standing, his mother being the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, the revered pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, and a religious author of repute. Jonathan, one of eleven children, showed extraordinary precocity. There is preserved a letter of his, written apparently in his twelfth year, in which he retorts upon the materialistic opinions of his correspondent with an easiness of banter not common to a boy; and another document, from about the same period, an elaborate account of the habits of spiders, displays a keenness of observation and a vividness of style uncommon at any age. He who could write such a sentence as the following was already a master in his own right: "In very calm and serene days in the forementioned time of year, standing at some distance behind the end of an house or some other opaque body, so as just to hide the disk of the sun and keep off his dazzling rays, and looking along close by the |