acter, and his daughter had the advantages of good tutoring, with access to the Earl's considerable library at Sempringham Castle. She was widely read but not learned, drawn chiefly toward the serious and religious writings of the Puritan world, and very little toward those of that other world, just waning, in which there still lived at her birth Shakespeare and Cervantes, Ben Jonson and Bacon.

In 1628, at the age of sixteen, she married Simon Bradstreet, a grave and brilliant young Puritan who had been trained at Cambridge and afterward by her father. Two years later, Bradstreet gave up his position as steward of the Countess of Warwick, and with his young wife embarked upon the Arabella for America. Dudley and his family also sailed on that ship, which brought the first settlers to the colony at Massachusetts Bay. One of the most active men in the colony, Dudley served four terms as governor. Simon Bradstreet was governor of the colony for ten years; he served also as judge, and represented Massachusetts at the court of Charles II when curtailment of the charter was threatened in 1661.

Meanwhile, in Cambridge, in Ipswich, and at their permanent home near Andover on the Merrimack, Anne Bradstreet's employments were no less taxing. În a whimsical poem she recorded, as domestic history: “I had eight birds hatcht in one nest,/ Four Cocks there were, and Hens the rest." All eight children thrived, and all but one survived her. Among many prominent descendants were the Channings; the R. H. Danas, fa

ther and son; Holmes the poet and Holmes the jurist; and, collaterally, Edwin Arlington Rob

inson.

In spite of the hardships of early colonial life and the duties of her household, Anne Bradstreet seems to have turned resolutely to authorship whenever she had the opportunity. Manuscripts of the poems in her first volume bear dates from 1632 to 1643. Whether she intended publication or not, she wrote a dedicatory poem to her father in 1642. In 1647 her sister's husband, John Woodbridge, pastor of the church of Andover, sailed to England and took her manuscript volume with him. Without her consent he had it published in London, in 1650, with the title, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts.

* *

It is not this bulky first work, but her less pretentious poems, published later, that have won her a place in literary history. The volume of 1650, consisting chiefly of rhymed discourses and chronicles, was agreeable to the taste of the period, but offers very little for the reader of today. In what the author called "Quaternions," or "Quaternions," or groups of four, she discussed "The Four Elements," "The Four Humours," "The Four Ages of Man," "The Four Seasons," and "The Four Monarchies." Nathaniel Ward, "the simple cobbler," in a commendatory poem called her "a right DuBartas Girle," and she herself admitted that she had attempted to emulate La Semaine by the French poet du Bartas, translated by Joshua Sylvester. There are also

traces of Raleigh's History of the World and Bishop Ussher's Annales.

Mrs. Bradstreet's poems in praise of various authors suggest other influences more helpful to her development as a poet. There are traces of Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, of Donne, Quarles, and Herbert, in her more lyrical poems, and these are given vitality by her observation of the familiar objects of her daily life. Her poems of religious experience and domestic intimacy are genuine, delicate, and charming. Most of them were written after The Tenth Muse appeared, one at least as late as 1669. About 1666 she revised all her poems for an authorized edition, which was not was not published until after her death, and completed the poem "Contemplations," a work of arresting integrity, for which she is best known. Among her surviving prose writings, her "Meditations" deserve to be particularly remembered for their lucid simplicity of style and their wise and generous spirit. The author of the ninth and the eighteenth stanzas of "Contemplations" was a genuine lyrist; there is

good craftsmanship in her handling of the extended last line of the "Contemplations" stanza, and of the difficult stanza form of "The Prologue"; but when all has been said, the principal contribution of Anne Bradstreet to posterity is what she revealed, through herself, of the first generation of New Englanders.

The first edition of Anne Bradstreet's writings was The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America ***, London, 1650, unsigned. The second edition, revised and enlarged by the author, for the first time including the "Contemplations," was posthumously published as Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Boston, 1678. This was reprinted in 1758. The best edition, with biographical and critical comment, is The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, edited by J. H. Ellis, 1867; reprinted 1932. In this edition the prose "Meditations" first appeared. A collection, The Tenth Muse (1650), Meditations * * and Other Works, ed. by Josephine K. Piercy, appeared in 1966. The texts below are from Ellis' edition, which reproduces those of the 1678 edition. The capital

ization, spelling, and punctuation have been normalized.

Biographies are Helen S. Campbell, Anne Bradstreet and Her Time, 1891;

and L. Caldwell, An Account of Anne

Bradstreets, 1898. Excellent sketches are by Moses C. Tyler, in A History of American Literature During the Colonial Period, 1878, revised 1897, 1949; and

by Lyon N. Richardson, in the Dictionary of American Biography, 1929. Josephine K. Piercy, Anne Bradstreet,

1965, is a critical study.

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1650 edition it stood at the beginning of that work, preceded only by her poem dedicating her poems to her father.