To this period belongs a poetic phenomenon—a metrical horror known as "The Bay Psalm Book," being the first English book ever issued from an American printing-press. Tyler has given with his accustomed happy facility of phrase the most truthful description yet made of a production that formed for years the chief poetical reading of the average New Englander, and undoubtedly did more to lower taste and make inferior verse seem praiseworthy than any and all other causes. He writes: "In turning over these venerable pages, one suffers by sympathy something of the obvious toil of the undaunted men who, in the very teeth of nature, did all this; and whose appalling sincerity must, in our eyes, cover a multitude of such sins as sentences wrenched about end for end, clauses heaved up and abandoned in chaos, words disemboweled or split quite in two in the middle, and dissonant combinations of sound that are the despair of such poor vocal organs as are granted to human beings. The verses seem to have been hammered out on an anvil, by blows from a blacksmith's sledge. In all parts of the book is manifest the agony it cost the writers to find two words that would rhyme—-more or less; and so often as this arduous feat is achieved, the poetic athlete appears to pause awhile from sheer exhaustion, panting heavily for breath. Let us now read, for our improvement, a part of the Fifty-eighth Psalm:
"The wicked are estranged from
the womb, they goe astray
as soon as ever they are borne,
uttering lyes are they.
Their poyson's like serpents' poyson,
they like deafe Aspe her eare
that stops. Though Charmer wisely charm,
his voice she will not heare.
Within their mouth, doe thou their teeth,
break out, O God most strong,
doe thou Jehovah, the great teeth
break of the lions young."
It is small wonder that Anne Bradstreet's poems struck the unhappy New Englanders who had been limited to verse of this description as the work of one who could be nothing less than the "Tenth Muse." When the first edition of her poems appeared, really in 1650, though the date is usually given as 1642, a younger generation had come upon the scene. The worst hardships were over. Wealth had accumulated, and the comfort which is the distinguishing characteristic of New England homes to-day, was well established. Harvard College was filled with bright young scholars, in whom her work awakened the keenest enthusiasm; who had insight enough to recognize her as the one shining example of poetic power in that generation, and who wrote innumerable elegies and threnodies on her life and work.
The elegy seems to have appealed more strongly to the Puritan mind than any other poetical form, and they exhausted every verbal device in perpetuating the memory of friends who scarcely needed this new terror added to a death already surrounded by a gloom that even their strongest faith hardly dispelled.
"Let groans inspire my quill," one clerical twister of language began, and another wrote with the painful and elephantine lightness which was the Puritan idea of humor, an epitaph which may serve as sufficient illustration of the whole unutterably dreary mass of verse:
"Gospel and law in's heart had each its column;
His head an index to the sacred volume;
His very name a title page and next
His life a commentary on the text.
Oh, what a monument of glorious worth,
When in a new edition he comes forth
Without erratas may we think he'll be,
In leaves and covers of eternity."
Better examples were before them, for books were imported freely, but minds had settled into the mould which they kept for more than one generation, unaffected in slightest measure by the steady progress of thought in the old home.
The younger writers were influenced to a certain degree by the new school, but lacked power to pass beyond it. Pope was now in full tide of success, and, with Thomson, Watts and Young, found hosts of sympathetic and admiring readers who would have turned in horror from the pages of Shakespeare or the early dramatists. The measure adopted by Pope charmed the popular mind, and while it helped to smooth the asperities of Puritan verse, became also the easy vehicle of the commonplace. There were hints here and there of something better to come, and in the many examples of verse remaining it is easy to discern a coming era of free thought and more musical expression. Peter Folger had sent out from the fogs of Nantucket a defiant and rollicking voice; John Rogers and Urian Oakes, both poets and both Harvard presidents, had done something better than mere rhyme, but it remained for another pastor, teacher and physician to sound a note that roused all New England. Michael Wigglesworth might have been immortal, could the genius born in him have been fed and trained by any of the "sane and mighty masters of English song"; but, born to the inheritance of a narrow and ferocious creed, with no power left to even admit the existence of the beautiful, he was "forever incapable of giving utterance to his genius—except in a dialect unworthy of it," and became simply "the explicit and unshrinking rhymer of the five points of Calvinism."
Cotton Mather describes him as "a feeble little shadow of a man." He was "the embodiment of what was great, earnest and sad in colonial New England." He was tenderly sympathetic, and his own life, made up mostly of sorrow and pain, filled him with longing to help others. "A sensitive, firm, wide-ranging, unresting spirit, he looks out mournfully over the throngs of men that fill the world, all of them totally depraved, all of them caught, from farthest eternity, in the adamantine meshes of God's decrees; the most of them also being doomed in advance by those decrees to an endless existence of ineffable torment; and upon this situation of affairs the excellent Michael Wigglesworth proposes to make poetry." His "Day of Doom," a horribly realistic description of every terror of the expected judgment, was written in a swinging ballad measure that took instant hold of the popular mind. No book ever printed in America has met with a proportionate commercial success. "The eighteen hundred copies of the first edition were sold within a single year; which implies the purchase of a copy of 'The Day of Doom' by at least every thirty-fifth person in New England…. Since that time the book has been repeatedly published, at least once in England and at least eight times in America, the last time being in 1867."
It penetrated finally all parts of the country where Puritan faith or manners prevailed. It was an intellectual influence far beyond anything we can now imagine. It was learned by heart along with the catechism, and for a hundred years was found on every book- shelf, no matter how sparsely furnished otherwise. Even after the Revolution, which produced the usual effect of all war in bringing in unrestrained thought, it was still a source of terror, and thrilled and prepared all readers for the equally fearful pictures drawn by Edwards and his successors.