"While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise _Thine, with thyself thou dost immortalize_. To view the odds thy learned lives invite 'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite. But all succeeding ages shall despair A fitting monument for thee to _rear_. Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!) Hath given them a lasting _writ of ease_." The epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious in the matter of puns, anagrams, and similar conceits. The death of the Rev. Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of this sort not to be missed, and his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a "whetstone," a "loadstone," an "Ebenezer"-- "A stone for kingly David's use so fit As would not fail Goliath's front to hit," etc. The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom_ (1663), a kind of doggerel _Inferno_, which went through nine editions, and "was the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his gloomy poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for its universal currency among a people like the Puritans. One stanza has been often quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants of "the easiest room in hell"--a _limbus infantum_ which even Origen need not have scrupled at.