The poet died in 1632, twelve years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and only two years after the larger movement of the Massachusetts Company, which began the settlement of Boston. The verses saw the light with difficulty, being refused the necessary license; but the functionary at last yielded, calling the author “a divine poet,” and expressing the hope that “the world will not take him to be an inspired prophet.”[260] Fuller, writing a little later, was perhaps moved by Herbert, when he said: “I am confident that America, though the youngest sister of the four, is now grown marriageable, and daily hopes to get Christ to her husband by the preaching of the Gospel.”[261] In a different vein, a contemporary poet, the favorite of Charles the First, Thomas Carew, in a masque performed by the monarch and his courtiers at Whitehall, February 18, 1633, made sport of New England, saying that it had “purged more virulent humors from the politic body than guaiacum and all the West Indian drugs have from the natural bodies of this kingdom.”[262] But these words uttered at the English Court were praise.
Then came answering voices from the Colonies. Rev. William Morrell, of the Established Church, a settler of 1623, said of New England, in a Latin poem translated by himself:—
“A grandchild to Earth’s paradise is born,
Well-limbed, well-nerved, fair, rich, sweet, yet forlorn.”[263]
“The Simple Cobbler of Agawam,” another name for Rev. Nathaniel Ward, of Ipswich, Mass., at the close of his witty book, first published in 1647, and having four different editions in this single year, sends an invitation to those at home:—
“So farewell, England Old!
If evil times ensue,
Let good men come to us,
We’ll welcome them to New.”
Another witness we meet in the writings of Franklin. It is George Webb, who, decamping from Oxford and the temptations of scholarship, indented himself according to the usage of the times, and became what Franklin calls “a bought servant” on our shores, where his genius flowered in the prophetic couplet, written in 1727:—