I am indebted to Mr. John Harvard Ellis's sumptuous edition of Anne Bradstreet's works, published in 1867, and containing all her extant works, for all extracts of either prose or verse, as well as for many of the facts incorporated in Mr. Ellis's careful introduction. Miss Bailey's "History of Andover," has proved a valuable aid, but not more so than "The History of New England," by Dr. John Gorham Palfrey, which affords in many points, the most careful and faithful picture on record of the time, personal facts, unfortunately, being of the most meager nature. They have been sought for chiefly, however, in the old records themselves; musty with age and appallingly diffuse as well as numerous, but the only source from which the true flavor of a forgotten time can be extracted. Barren of personal detail as they too often are, the writer of the present imperfect sketch has found Anne Bradstreet, in spite of all such deficiencies, a very real and vital person, and ends her task with the belief which it is hoped that the reader may share, that among the honorable women not a few whose lives are to-day our dearest possession, not one claims tenderer memory than she who died in New England two hundred years ago. NEW YORK, 1890. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE OLD HOME CHAPTER II. UPHEAVALS CHAPTER III. THE VOYAGE CHAPTER IV. BEGINNINGS CHAPTER V. OLD FRIENDS AND NEW CHAPTER VI. A THEOLOGICAL TRAGEDY CHAPTER VII. COLONIAL LITERARY DEVELOPMENT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY CHAPTER VIII. SOME PHASES OF EARLY COLONIAL LIFE CHAPTER IX. ANDOVER CHAPTER X. VILLAGE LIFE IN 1650 CHAPTER XI A FIRST EDITION CHAPTER XII. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS CHAPTER XIII. CHANCES AND CHANGES CHAPTER XIV. A LEGACY CHAPTER XV. THE PURITAN REIGN OF TERROR CHAPTER XVI. HOME AND ABROAD CHAPTER XVII. THE END ANNE BRADSTREET AND HER TIME. CHAPTER I. THE OLD HOME. The birthday of the baby, Anne Dudley, has no record; her birthplace even is not absolutely certain, although there is little doubt that it was at Northhampton in England, the home of her father's family. She opened her eyes upon a time so filled with crowding and conflicting interests that there need be no wonder that the individual was more or less ignored, and personal history lost in the general. To what branch of the Dudley family she belonged is also uncertain. Moore, in his "Lives of the Governors of New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay," writes: "There is a tradition among the descendants of Governor Dudley in the eldest branch of the family, that he was descended from John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who was beheaded 22 February, 1553." Such belief was held for a time, but was afterward disallowed by Anne Bradstreet. In her "Elegy upon Sir Philip Sidney," whose mother, the Lady Mary, was the eldest daughter of that Duke of Northumberland, she wrote: "Let, then, none disallow of these my straines, Which have the self-same blood yet in my veines."