Certainly no English brain or
hand added to the literature of this time, and the only bit of writing
which survives is the work of a Dutch minister.

In the eighteenth year after the coming of the English, when it had
come to be 1682, Dominie Henricus Selyns came to New York from
Holland. He had lived four years in the town when it was New
Amsterdam, and we have his own words for it that he found the
settlement scarcely altered a whit from the time he left. And now he
took charge of the little church in the fort, the same church where
Nicasius De Sille was married with such pomp. His congregation was
made up of much the same kind of people as of old, and perhaps it was
just as well, since he still preached in the Dutch language. The poems
he wrote, all in the Dutch language, were read as piously as were the
Bibles, and were quite at one with them in religious feeling. No one
then imagined that a day would come when a critic might hint that the
good Dominie's contributions to the early literature of New York might
be just a shade gloomy and despairing in their views of the
fearfulness of the after-life.

[Illustration: The Church in the Fort]

For quite twenty years the good Dominie lived to aid in fostering the
infant literature of infant New York, living a life as quiet and as
regular as any Dutch colonist could have demanded. On a Sunday morning
he preached in the church in the fort the long, heavy sermons that his
people loved. In the afternoon he rode away on the highway that led
into the country, past the Collect Pond, over the Kissing Bridge at
the Fresh Water, on to the stretch that was to grow into the Bowery,
through the forest till he came to the few clustering houses of the
Bouwerie Village, where Stuyvesant had spent his old age. In the
village church he preached of an afternoon,--the church which
Stuyvesant had built and beside which he was buried,--the church which
was to stand another hundred years and which was then to give way to a
house of worship to be called St. Mark's, which, in turn, two
centuries and more after Stuyvesant's day, was still to be found
standing in the core of a great metropolis.

[Illustration: Capt. Kidd's House]

Dominie Selyns lived long enough to see many changes. He lived to see
a Dutch prince become England's king; he lived to see New York rent
asunder through the overzealousness of one Jacob Leisler, who feared
lest the town should not recognize a king of Dutch blood;