the sweep of emotions as our contemporaries upon whose
book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread.

It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we
can estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the
pioneers themselves. The "Bay Psalm Book" (1640), the first book
printed in the colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of
the magnificent King James Version of the Psalms, designed to be
sung in churches. Few of the New England churches could sing more
than half-a-dozen tunes, and a pitch-pipe was for a long time the
only musical instrument allowed. Judged as hymnology or poetry,
the Bay "Psalm Book" provokes a smile. But the men and women who
used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with their hearts
aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem as
Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom" one must strip oneself quite free
from the twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the
chimney-corner of a Puritan kitchen, reading aloud by that
firelight which, as Lowell once humorously suggested, may have
added a "livelier relish" to the poet's "premonitions of eternal
combustion." Lowell could afford to laugh about it, having
crossed that particular black brook. But for several generations
the boys and girls of New England had read the "Day of Doom" as
if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat sickly minister of
Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion
to underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best
it has a trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and
a sound like clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning
ballad-makers have imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen
by the nervous little parson. But no living poet can move his
readers to the fascinated horror once felt by the Puritans as