and numerous poems.... His principal poem, _La Semaine,_ went
through more than thirty editions in less than six years, and was
translated into Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, German and
Dutch."

The influence was an unfortunate one. Nature had already been set
aside so thoroughly that, as with Dryden, Spenser was regarded as
common-place and even puerile, and the record of real life or
thought as no part of a poet's office. Such power of observation
as Anne Bradstreet had was discouraged in the beginning, and
though later it asserted itself in slight degree, her early work
shows no trace of originality, being, as we are soon to see,
merely a rhymed paraphrase of her reading. That she wrote verse,
not included in any edition of her poems, we know, the earliest
date assigned there being 1632, but the time she had dreaded was
at hand, and books and study went the way of many other pleasant
things.

With the dread must have mingled a certain thrill of hope and
expectation common to every thinking man and woman who in that
seventeenth century looked to the New World to redress every wrong
of the Old, and who watched every movement of the little band that
in Holland waited, for light on the doubtful and beclouded future.

The story of the first settlement needs no repetition here. The
years in Holland had knit the little band together more strongly
and lastingly than proved to be the case with any future company,
their minister, John Robinson, having infused his own intense and
self-abnegating nature into every one. That the Virginian colonies
had suffered incredibly they knew, but it had no power to dissuade