cter-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 immortalize_.
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, 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 Goliath's front to hit," etc.

The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of
colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom_ (1663), a
kind of doggerel _Inferno_, which went through nine editions, and "was
the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the
pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to
its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the
technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language
rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are
more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are
an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his
gloomy poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for
its universal currency among a people like the Puritans. One stanza
has bee