Wilderness of Spring

... For if I am in sore plight, I would not therefore wish affliction to be the lot of all the world. No, indeed, no! since, besides, I am distressed by the fate of my brother Atlas, who, towards the west, stands bearing on his shoulders the pillar of heaven and earth, a burthen not easy for his arms to grasp. —AESCHYLUS, Prometheus Bound .
Rinehart & Company, Inc. NEW YORK TORONTO
Published simultaneously in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company, Ltd., Toronto
Copyright 1958 by Edgar Pangborn
Printed in the United States of America
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-5139
To my Sister , MARY C. PANGBORN
NOTE: Pastor John Williams of Deerfield is a historical figure; Belding, Stebbins, Hoyt, Wells and Hawks were actual names in the Deerfield of 1704. With these minor exceptions, all characters in this novel are completely fictitious, not intended to suggest any actual person living or dead.
The language of the dialogue is a compromise, an attempt to convey some quality of early eighteenth-century speech, but not to create a literal reproduction of it, since that might be tedious and obscure in some places to modern readers. For a literal reproduction the worst nuisance would have been those words, such as naughty, that have changed not in form but in meaning or emotional charge. I have tried to avoid all these except where the context should make plain their archaic sense. I think the use of thee and thou is substantially correct. At that time the second person singular could be used in English as in most European languages today, for intimates and children, but the universal you was already displacing it. The third person singular verb ending was obsolescent but still in some use; hath and doth seem to have survived long after the ending was abandoned in other verbs.
In the modern ( Everyman ) edition of Montaigne, the essay that Mr. Kenny asks for is entitled Of Training instead of Use Makes Perfect. The copy from Mr. Kenny's library was the seventeenth-century translation by Charles Cotton.