A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ A History of American Literature. Colonial Period (1607–1765), Vol. I, chaps. x, xi. 1878.

       Individual Authors

      The Bay Psalm Book. The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre, etc. 1640.

      Available Editions

      A Reprint, 1862.

      Facsimile Reprint for the New England Society in the City of New York, 1903.

       Collections

      Cairns, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 73–81.

      Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 16–18.

      Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 211–216.

      Michael Wigglesworth. The Day of Doom; or, a Description of the Great and Last Judgment, etc. (1662). Meat out of the Eater: or, Meditations concerning the necessity, end and usefulness of Afflictions unto God’s Children, etc. (1670). God’s Controversy with New England (1662). Vanity of Vanities (appended to 3d edition of The Day of Doom).

      Available Editions

      The Day of Doom, 1867.

      God’s Controversy with New England. Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Soc., 1871.

      Biography

      Memoir of Michael Wigglesworth. J. W. Dean. 1871. See also M. W.,* earliest poet among Harvard graduates. Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Soc., 1895.

      Collections

      Boynton, Percy H. American Poetry, pp. 18–23, 598–600.

      Cairns, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 163–177.

      Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 57–59.

      Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 3–19.

      Anne Bradstreet. The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America, or Several Poems, compiled with great Variety of Wit and Learning, full of Delight – by a Gentlewoman in those parts. 1650.

      Available Editions

      The Club of Odd Volumes, 1897.

      The Works of Anne Bradstreet, in Prose and Verse. J. H. Ellis, editor. 1867. This contains a valuable memoir.

      The Works of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, together with her prose remains, and with an introduction by Charles Eliot Norton.

      Biography and Criticism

      Campbell, Helen. Anne Bradstreet and her Time. 1891.

      Tyler, M. C. American Literature. Colonial Period, Vol. I, chap. x.

      Collections

      Boynton, Percy H. American Poetry, pp. 1–8, 594–598.

      Cairns, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 146–164.

      Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 47–52.

      Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 311–315.

      TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

      Confirm the comparison of meters in the “Bay Psalm Book” and “The Day of Doom.”

      Read the opening and closing passages in “The Day of Doom” (Boynton, “American Poetry,” pp. 18–21) for the genuinely poetic material. Compare with Milton’s use of the same material in “Paradise Lost,” Bk. I.

      Read Anne Bradstreet’s verses to Queen Elizabeth, the Prologue to the long poems, the rimed epistles to her husband, and the tributary poems of Nathaniel Ward and others (Boynton, “American Poetry,” pp. 1–13 passim) for the difference – even with her liberalism – between her point of view and that of the modern woman.

      Read “Contemplations” and a passage of equal length from “The Faerie Queene” for likenesses and differences in versification.

      Compare the ideas of God and of nature in “Contemplations” (of the later seventeenth century), “Thanatopsis” (of the early nineteenth), and “The Marshes of Glynn” (of the later nineteenth) and note how far they are personal to Anne Bradstreet, Bryant, and Lanier and how far they represent the spirit of their respective periods.

      CHAPTER III

      THE TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

      As the end of the seventeenth century approached, the Puritans were still in an overwhelming majority in New England, but the hold of the churchmen on the government of the colonies was, nevertheless, being slowly and reluctantly relaxed. Government in America has always, in its broad aspects, reflected the will of the people. If legislators and legislation have been vicious, it has been because the majority of the people have not cared enough about it to see that good men were chosen. If stupid and blundering laws have been passed, it has been because the people were not wide awake enough to analyze them. On the other hand old laws, unadjusted to modern conditions, have often become “dead letters” because the majority did not wish to have them enforced, even though they were on the statute books; and new and progressive legislation has been imposed on reluctant lawmakers by the pressure of public opinion. Now the Puritan uprising in England had been a democratic movement by a people who wanted to have a hand in their own government. It was a religious movement, because in England Church and State are one and because the oppression in religious matters had been particularly offensive. And in England it had been on the whole successful in spite of the restoration of kingship in 1660, for from that time on the arbitrary power of king and council were steadily and increasingly curbed. As a consequence there was a parallel movement in the democracy across the sea. American colonists with a highly developed sense of justice resented a bad royal governor like Andros, and were able to force his withdrawal; and they resented unreasonable domination by the clergy, and were independent enough to shake it off. Between 1690 and 1700 Harvard College became for the first time something more than a training school for preachers; the right to vote in Boston was made to depend on moral character and property ownership instead of on membership in the church; and in the midst of the Salem witchcraft hysteria judges and grand-jurymen caught their balance and refused any longer to act as cat’s-paws of the clergy. The passage to the eighteenth century was therefore a time of transition in common thinking; and the record of the change is clearly discernible in the literary writings of the old-line conservatives Cotton and Increase Mather, in the Diary of Samuel Sewall, who was able to see the light and to change slowly with his generation, and in the Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight, who represented the silent unorthodoxy of hundreds of other well-behaved and respectable people.

      The Mathers, Increase (1639–1723) and Cotton (1663–1728), were the second and third of a succession of four members of one family who were so popular and influential as to deserve the nickname which is sometimes given them of the “Mather Dynasty.” These two were both born in America, educated in Boston and at Harvard, and made church leaders while still young men. In age they were only twenty-four years apart, and from 1682 to 1723 they worked together to uphold and increase the power of the church in New England. Because of their prominence as preachers they inherited the “good will” which had belonged to СКАЧАТЬ