"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