they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the future of
the soul's destiny.

Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other
verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for
instance, are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite
of their didactic themes and portentous length. But this lady,
born in England, the daughter of Governor Dudley and later the
wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the more fantastic
of the moralizing poets of England and France. There is little in
her hundreds of pages which seems today the inevitable outcome of
her own experience in the New World. For readers who like roughly
mischievous satire, of a type initiated in England by Bishop Hall
and Donne, there is "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam" written by the
roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a dozen years
in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely more
"American" than the satire upon German professors in "Sartor
Resartus" is "German." Like Charles Dickens's "American Notes,"
Ward's give the reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of
the sights and the talk and the personages of the transatlantic
world.

Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those
that have lost least of their interest through the lapse of years
are narratives of struggles with the Indians. The image of the
"bloody savage" has always hovered in the background of the
American imagination. Our boys and girls have "played Indian"
from the beginning, and the actual Indian is still found, as for
three hundred years past, upon the frontier fringe of our
civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like Parkman,