College, at New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Connecticut
plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college at their
own doors. A printing press was set up at Cambridge in 1639, which was
under the oversight of the university authorities, and afterwards of
licensers appointed by the civil power. The press was no more free in
Massachusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed
printing," for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his
_Areopagitica_, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New England until some
twenty years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. "The
Freeman's Oath" and an almanac were issued from the Cambridge press in
1639, and in 1640 the first English book printed in America, a
collection of the psalms in meter, made by various ministers, and known
as the _Bay Psalm Book_. The poetry of this version was worse, if
possible, than that of Sternhold and Hopkins's famous rendering; but it
is noteworthy that one of the principal translators was that devoted
"Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63,
translated the Bible into the Algonkin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled
a lifetime for the conversion of those "salvages," "tawnies,"
"devil-worshipers," for whom our early writers have usually nothing but
bad words. They have been destroyed instead of converted; but his (so
entitled) _Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe {338} Up-Biblum God naneeswe
Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament_--the first Bible printed in
America--remains a monument of missionary zeal and a work of great
value to students of the Indian languages.

A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the history of
old New England, it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there, and
the landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is the impression which
one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's and
Winthrop's _Journals_, or Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_: an
impression of gloom, of night and cold, of mysterious fears besieging
the infant settlements, scattered in a narrow fringe "between the
groaning forest and the shore." The Indian terror hung over New
England for more than half a century, or until the issue of King
Philip's War, in 1676, relieved the colonists of any danger of a
general massacre. Added to this were the perplexities caused by the
earnest resolve of the settlers to keep their New English Eden free
from the intrusion of the serpent in the