Earth thou hast not moe countrys vales & mounds
Then I have fountains, rivers lakes and ponds;
My sundry seas, black, white and Adriatique,
Ionian, Baltique, and the vast Atlantique,
Aegean, Caspian, golden rivers fire,
Asphaltis lake, where nought remains alive:
But I should go beyond thee in my boasts,
If I should name more seas than thou hast Coasts,
And be thy mountains ne'er so high and steep,
I soon can match them with my seas as deep.
To speak of kinds of waters I neglect,
My diverse fountains and their strange effect:
My wholsome bathes, together with their cures;
My water Syrens with their guilefull lures,
The uncertain cause of certain ebbs and flows,
Which wondring Aristotles wit n'er knows,
Nor will I speak of waters made by art,
Which can to life restore a fainting heart.
Nor fruitfull dews, nor drops distil'd from eyes,
Which pitty move, and oft deceive the wise:
Nor yet of salt and sugar, sweet and smart,
Both when we lift to water we convert.
Alas thy ships and oars could do no good
Did they but want my Ocean and my flood.
The wary merchant on his weary beast
Transfers his goods from south to north and east,
Unless I ease his toil, and do transport
The wealthy fraight unto his wished port,
These be my benefits, which may suffice:
I now must shew what ill there in me lies.
The flegmy Constitution I uphold,
All humours, tumours which are bred of cold:
O're childhood and ore winter I bear sway,
And Luna for my Regent I obey.
As I with showers oft times refresh the earth,
So oft in my excess I cause a dearth,
And with abundant wet so cool the ground,
By adding cold to cold no fruit proves found.
The Farmer and the Grasier do complain
Of rotten sheep, lean kine, and mildew'd grain.
And with my wasting floods and roaring torrent,
Their cattel hay and corn I sweep down current.
Nay many times my Ocean breaks his bounds,
And with astonishment the world confounds,
And swallows Countryes up, ne'er seen again,
And that an island makes which once was main:
Thus Britian fair ('tis thought) was cut from France
Scicily from Italy by the like chance,
And but one land was Africa and Spain
Untill proud Gibraltar did make them twain.
Some say I swallow'd up (sure tis a notion)
A mighty country in th' Atlantique Ocean.
I need not say much of my hail and Snow,
My ice and extream cold, which all men know,
Whereof the first so ominous I rain'd,
That Israel's enemies therewith were brain'd;
And of my chilling snows such plenty be,
That Caucasus high mounts are seldome free,
Mine ice doth glaze Europes great rivers o're,
Till sun release, their ships can sail no more,
All know that inundations I have made,
Wherein not men, but mountains seem'd to wade;
As when Achaia all under water stood,
That for two hundred years it n'er prov'd good.
Deucalions great Deluge with many moe,
But these are trifles to the flood of Noe,
Then wholly perish'd Earths ignoble race,
And to this day impairs her beauteous face,
That after times shall never feel like woe,
Her confirm'd sons behold my colour'd bow.
Much might I say of wracks, but that He spare,
And now give place unto our Sister Air.
There is a mild self-complacency, a sunny and contented assertion about "sister Air," that must have proved singularly aggravating to the others, who, however, make no sign as to the final results, the implication being, that she is after all the one absolutely indispensable agent. But to end nowhere, each side fully convinced in its own mind that the point had been carried in its own favor, was so eminently in the spirit of the time, that there be no wonder at the silence as to the real victor, though it is surprising that Mistress Bradstreet let slip so excellent an opportunity for the moral so dear to the Puritan mind.
Content (quoth Air) to speak the last of you,
Yet am not ignorant first was my due:
I do suppose you'l yield without controul
I am the breath of every living soul.
Mortals, what one of you that loves not me
Abundantly more than my Sisters three?
And though you love fire, Earth and Water well
Yet Air beyond all these you know t' excell.
I ask the man condemn'd that's neer his death,
How gladly should his gold purchase his breath,
And all the wealth that ever earth did give,
How freely should it go so he might live:
No earth, thy witching trash were all but vain,
If my pure air thy sons did not sustain,
The famish'd thirsty man that craves supply,
His moving reason is, give least I dye,
So both he is to go though nature's spent
To bid adieu to his dear Element.
Nay what are words which do reveal the mind,
Speak who or what they will they are but wind.
Your drums your trumpets & your organs found,
What is't but forced air which doth rebound,
And such are ecchoes and report of th' gun
That tells afar th' exploit which it hath done,
Your songs and pleasant tunes they are the same,
And so's the notes which Nightingales do frame.
Ye forging Smiths, if bellows once were gone
Your red hot work more coldly would go on.
Ye Mariners, tis I that fill your sails,
And speed you to your port with wished gales.
When burning heat doth cause you faint, I cool,
And when I smile, your ocean's like a pool.
I help to ripe the corn, I turn the mill,
And with myself I every Vacuum fill.
The ruddy sweet sanguine is like to air,
And youth and spring, Sages to me compare,
My moist hot nature is so purely thin,
No place so subtilly made, but I get in.
I grow more pure and pure as I mount higher,
And when I'm thoroughly varifi'd turn fire:
So when I am condens'd, I turn to water,
Which may be done by holding down my vapour.
Thus I another body can assume,
And in a trice my own nature resume.
Some for this cause of late have been so bold
Me for no Element longer to hold,
Let such suspend their thoughts, and silent be,
For all Philosophers make one of me:
And what those Sages either spake or writ
Is more authentick then our modern wit.
Next of my fowles such multitudes there are,
Earths beasts and waters fish scarce can compare.
Th' Ostrich with her plumes th' Eagle with her eyn
The Phoenix too (if any be) are mine,
The Stork, the crane, the partridg, and the phesant
The Thrush, the wren, the lark a prey to th' pesant,
With thousands more which now I may omit
Without impeachment to my tale or wit.
As my fresh air preserves all things in life,
So when corrupt, mortality is rife;
Then Fevers, Pmples, Pox and Pestilence,
With divers more, work deadly consequence:
Whereof such multitudes have di'd and fled,
The living scarce had power to bury the dead;
Yea so contagious countryes have we known
That birds have not 'Scapt death as they have flown
Of murrain, cattle numberless did fall,
Men feared destruction epidemical.
Then of my tempests felt at sea and land,
Which neither ships nor houses could withstand,
What wofull wracks I've made may well appear,
If nought were known but that before Algere,
Where famous Charles the fifth more loss sustained
Then in his long hot war which Millain gain'd
Again what furious storms and Hurricanoes
Know western Isles, as Christophers Barbadoes;
Where neither houses, trees nor plants I spare,
But some fall down, and some fly up with air.
Earthquakes so hurtfull, and so fear'd of all,
Imprison'd I, am the original.
Then what prodigious sights I sometimes show,
As battles pitcht in th' air, as countryes know,
Their joyning fighting, forcing and retreat,
That earth appears in heaven, O wonder great!
Sometimes red flaming swords and blazing stars,
Portentous signs of famines, plagues and wars,
Which make the Monarchs fear their fates
By death or great mutation of their States.
I have said less than did my Sisters three,
But what's their wrath or force, the fame's in me.
To adde to all I've said was my intent,
But dare not go beyond my Element.
Here the contest ends, and though the second edition held slight alterations here and there, no further attempt was made to add to or take away from the verses, which are as a whole the best examples of the early work, their composition doubtless beguiling many weary hours of the first years in New England. "The four Humours of Man" follows, but holds only a few passages of any distinctive character, the poem, like her "Four Monarchies," being only a paraphrase of her reading. In "The Four Seasons," there was room for picturesque treatment of the new conditions that surrounded her, but she seems to have been content, merely to touch the conventional side of nature, and to leave her own impressions and feelings quite out of the question. The verses should have held New England as it showed itself to the colonists, with all the capricious charges that moved their wonder in the early days. There was everything, it would have seemed, to excite such poetical power as she possessed, to the utmost, for even the prose of more than one of her contemporaries gives hints of the feeling that stirred within them as they faced the strange conditions of the new home. Even when they were closely massed together, the silent spaces of the great wilderness shut them in, its mystery beguiling yet bewildering them, and the deep woods with their unfamiliar trees, the dark pines on the hill-side, all held the sense of banishment and even terror. There is small token of her own thoughts or feelings, in any lines of hers, till late in life, when she dropped once for all the methods that pleased her early years, and in both prose and poetry spoke her real mind with a force that fills one with regret at the waste of power in the dreary pages of the "Four Monarchies." That she had keen susceptibility to natural beauty this later poem abundantly proves, but in most of them there is hardly a hint of what must have impressed itself upon her, though probably it was the more valued by her readers, for this very reason.