suggestion to Shakespeare for _The Tempest_; (3) two poets, (a) George
Sandys, who translated part of Ovid, and (b) the unknown author of the
elegy on Nathaniel Bacon; and (4) Robert Beverly and William Byrd, who gave
interesting descriptions of early Virginia.

The chief colonial writers of New England are: (1) William Bradford, whose
_History of Plymouth Plantation_ tells the story of the first Pilgrim
colony; (2) John Winthrop, who wrote in his _Journal_ the early history of
the Massachusetts Bay Colony; (3) the poets, including (a) the translators
of the _Bay Psalm Book_, the first volume of so-called verse printed in the
British American colonies, (b) Wigglesworth, whose _Day of Doom_, was a
poetic exposition of Calvinistic theology, (c) Anne Bradstreet, who wrote a
small amount of genuine poetry, after she had passed from the influence of
the "fantastic" school of poets; (4) Nathaniel Ward, the author of _The
Simple Cobbler of Agawam_, an attempt to mend human ways; (5) Samuel
Sewall, New England's greatest colonial diarist; (6) Cotton Mather, the
most famous clerical writer, whose _Magnalia_ is a compound of early
colonial history and biography, sometimes written in a "fantastic" style;
(7) Jonathan Edwards, America's greatest metaphysician and theologian, who
maintained that the action of the human will is determined by the strongest
motive, that the substance of this universe is nothing but "the divine
Idea," communicated to human consciousness, and who could invest spiritual
truth with the beauty of the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the valleys.

The New England colonist came to America because of religious feeling. His
religion was to him a matter of eternal life or eternal death. From the
modern point of view, this religion may seem too inflexibly stern, too
little illumined by the spirit of love, too much darkened by the shadow of
eternal punishment, but unless that religion had communicated something of
its own dominating inflexibility to the colonist, he would never have