Anne Bradstreet and Her Time | Page 5

lighter minded among them. But the burden of the time pressed more
and more heavily. Freedom which had seemed for a time to have taken
firm root, and to promise a better future for English thought and life,
lessened day by day under the pressure of the Stuart dynasty, and every
Nonconformist home was the center of anxieties that influenced every
member of it from the baby to the grandsire, whose memory covered
more astonishing changes than any later day has known.
The year preceding Anne Dudley's birth, had seen the beginning of the
most powerful influence ever produced upon a people, made ready for
it, by long distrust of such teaching as had been allowed. With the
translation of the Bible into common speech, and the setting up of the
first six copies in St. Pauls, its popularity had grown from day to day.
The small Geneva Bibles soon appeared and their substance had
become part of the life of every English family within an incredibly

short space of time. Not only thought and action but speech itself were
colored and shaped by the new influence. We who hold to it as a well
of English undefiled, and resent even the improvements of the new
Version as an infringement on a precious possession, have small
conception of what it meant to a century which had had no prose
literature and no poetry save the almost unknown verse of Chaucer.
"Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round
the Bible in the nave of St. Pauls, or the family group that hung on its
words in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new
literature. Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State-roll and
biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists,
stories of mission-journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathens,
philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast
over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The
disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution
of Renaissance. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature,
wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was
far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could
transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave
their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters,
therefore, remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the few,
and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the
pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine
Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the
language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent
themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a
mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the
noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it
from the instant of its appearance, the standard of our language.
"One must dwell upon this fact persistently, before it will become
possible to understand aright either the people or the literature of the
time. With generations the influence has weakened, though the best in
English speech has its source in one fountain. But the Englishman of
that day wove his Bible into daily speech, as we weave Shakespeare or
Milton or our favorite author of a later day. It was neither affectation

nor hypocrisy but an instinctive use that made the curious mosaic of
Biblical words and phrases which colored English talk two hundred
years ago. The mass of picturesque allusion and illustration which we
borrow from a thousand books, our fathers were forced to borrow from
one; and the borrowing was the easier and the more natural, that the
range of the Hebrew literature fitted it for the expression of every phase
of feeling. When Spencer poured forth his warmest love-notes in the
'Epithalamion,' he adopted the very words of the Psalmist, as he bade
the gates open for the entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the
mists break over the hills of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the
cry of David: 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as
the smoke vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' Even to common
minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and
apocalypse, gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its
tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod
vulgarisms of today."
Children caught the influence, and even baby talk was half scriptural,
so that there need be no surprise in finding Anne Bradstreet's earliest
recollections couched in the phrases of psalms learned by heart as soon
as she could speak, and used, no doubt, half unconsciously.