[Illustration: GEORGE SANDYS]

POETRY IN THE VIRGINIA COLONY.--GEORGE SANDYS (1577-1644), during his
stay in the colony as its treasurer, translated ten books of Ovid's
_Metamorphoses_, sometimes working by the light of a pine knot. This work
is rescued from the class of mere translation by its literary art and
imaginative interpretation, and it possesses for us an additional interest
because of its nativity amid such surroundings. Two lines telling how
Philemon

"Took down a flitch of bacon with a prung,
That long had in the smoky chimney hung,"

show that his environment aided him somewhat in the translation. He himself
says of this version that it was "bred in the new world, whereof it cannot
but participate, especially having wars and tumults to bring it to light,
instead of the muses." He was read by both Dryden and Pope in their
boyhood, and the form of their verse shows his influence.

The only original poem which merits our attention in the early Virginian
colony was found soon after the Revolutionary War in a collection of
manuscripts, known as the _Burwell Papers_. This poem is an elegy on the
death of Nathaniel Bacon (1676), a young Virginian patriot and military
hero, who resisted the despotic governor, Sir William Berkeley. It was
popularly believed that Bacon's mysterious death was due to poison. An
unknown friend wrote the elegy in defense of Bacon and his rebellion. These
lines from that elegy show a strength unusual in colonial poetry:--

"Virginia's foes,