4 Anne Bradstreet – Meditations Divine and Moral
Biography
Anne Bradstreet (née Dudley; March 20, 1612 – September 16, 1672) was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first writer in England’s North American colonies to be published. She is the first Puritan figure in American Literature and notable for her large corpus of poetry, as well as personal writings published posthumously.
Born to a wealthy Puritan family in Northampton, England, Bradstreet was a well-read scholar especially affected by the works of Du Bartas. She was married at sixteen, and her parents and young family migrated at the time of the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. A mother of eight children and the wife and daughter of public officials in New England, Bradstreet wrote poetry in addition to her other duties. Her early works read in the style of Du Bartas, but her later writings develop into her unique style of poetry which centers on her role as a mother, her struggles with the sufferings of life, and her Puritan faith. Her first collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was widely read in America and England.
Source: Anne Bradstreet. Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0; additional terms may apply
Meditations Divine and Moral (Selected)
II. Any can speak well, but few can do well. We are better scholars in the theory then the practice part, but he is a true Christian that is proficient in both.
III. Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age spending; a negligent youth is usually attended by an ignorant middle age, and both by an empty old age. He that hath nothing to feed on but vanity and lies must needs lie down in the bed of sorrow.
IV. The ship that bears much sail, and little or no ballast, is easily overturned; and that man, whose head hath great abilities, and his heart little or no grace, is in danger of foundering.
XVII. Few men are as humble as not to be proud of their abilities; and nothing will abase them more than this: What haft thou, but what though has received? Come give an account of thy stewardship.
XLVII. Shadow in the parching sun, and a shelter in a blustering storm, are of all seasons the most welcome: of a faithful friend in time of adversity, is of all the most comfortable.
LV. We read of ten lepers that were cleansed, but of only one that returned thanks: we are more ready to receive mercies then we are to acknowledge them.
Source: Bradstreet, Anne. Meditations Divine and Moral in The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Poetry and Verse (Edited by John Harvard Ellis, 1962). Public domain text from HathiTrust. Modernized by Genevieve Shaker.
