e cheerily and kindly to him, and besought me
privately to do somewhat to help her remove his vexation. So we did
discourse of many things very pleasantly. Mr. Richardson, on hearing
Rebecca say that the Indians did take the melancholy noises of the
pinetrees in the winds to be the voices of the Spirits of the woods,
said that they always called to his mind the sounds in the mulberry-
trees which the Prophet spake of. Hereupon Rebecca, who hath her memory
well provided with divers readings, both of the poets and other writers,
did cite very opportunely some ingenious lines, touching what the
heathens do relate of the Sacred Tree of Dodona, the rustling of whose
leaves the negro priestesses did hold to be the language of the gods.
And a late writer, she said, had something in one of his pieces, which
might well be spoken of the aged and dead tree-trunk, upon which we were
sitting. And when we did all desire to know their import, she repeated
them thus:--

"Sure thou didst flourish once, and many springs,
Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers,
Passed o'er thy head; many light hearts and wings,
Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers."

"And still a new succession sings and flies,
Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot
Towards the old and still enduring skies,
While the low violet thriveth at their root."

These lines, she said, were written by one Vaughn, a Brecknockshire
Welsh Doctor of Medicine, who had printed a little book not many years
ago. Mr. Richardson said the lines were good, but that he did hold the
reading of ballads and the conceits of rhymers a waste of time, to say
nothing worse. Sir Thomas hereat said that, as far as he could judge,
the worthy folk of New England had no great temptation to that sin from
their own poets, and did then, in a drolling tone, repeat some verses of
the 137th Psalm, which he said were the best he had seen in the
Cambridge Psalm Book:--

"The rivers of Babylon,
There when we did sit down,
Yea, even then we mourned when
We remembered Sion.

Our harp we did hang it amid
Upon the willow-tree;
Because there they that us away
Led to captivity!

Required of us a song, and thus