the
Church. Sewall was one of the first writers against African slavery,
in his brief tract, _The Selling of Joseph_, printed at Boston in 1700.
His _Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, a mystical interpretation of
prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies with
America, is remembered only because Whittier, in his _Prophecy of
Samuel Sewall_, has paraphrased one poetic passage, which shows a
loving observation of nature very rare in our colonial writers.

Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the narrower
sense--that is, of the imaginative representation of life--there was
little or none in the colonial period. There were no novels, no plays,
no satires, and--until the example of the _Spectator_ had begun to work
on this side the water--no experiments even at the lighter forms {354}
of essay writing, character sketches, and literary criticism. There
was verse of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term
would hardly allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early divines
of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon writing,
of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles
distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphysical poets,"
whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner
of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New English muse, the
_Emblems_ of Quarles and the _Divine Week_ of Du Bartas, as translated
by Sylvester. The _Magnalia_ contains a number of these things in
Latin and English, and is itself well bolstered with complimentary
introductions in meter by the author's friends. For example:

COTTONIUS MATHERUS.

ANAGRAM.

_Tuos Tecum Ornasti_.

"While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise
_Thine, with thyself, thou dost immortalise_,
To view the odds thy learned lives invite
'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite.
But all succeeding ages shall despair
A fitting monument for thee to _rear_.
Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!)
Hath given them a lasting _writ of ease_."

The epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious in the
matter of puns, anagrams, {355} and similar conceits. The death of the
Rev. Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of this sort
not to be missed, and his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a
"whetstone," a "loadstone," an "Ebenezer"--

"A stone for kingly David's use so fit
As would not fail Gol