A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes
and Samuel Sewall was with the quiet majority who sadly left them behind.
A third representative of the attitudes of mind at the changing of the centuries was a genial woman, Mrs. Sarah Kemble Knight (1666–1727). She was not in any sense a public figure, like the preachers and the judge just mentioned, nor did she pursue the habit of writing a continued diary like Sewall’s. Most emphatically she was not given to the unwholesome recording, like many other women in her day, of “itineraries of daily religious progress, aggravated by overwork, indigestion, and a gospel of gloom.” But there was one itinerary which she did record for her own satisfaction and which was published more than a century later, in 1825, – her “Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York in 1704.” At this time a vigorous woman of thirty-eight, a wife and a mother, she set out alone on the ten-day journey, taking such guides as she could engage from one stage to the next. The hardships were considerable and the discomforts and inconveniences very great; and the striking fact about them is that she bore up under them in a good-humored, matter-of-fact, sort of twentieth-century way. An accident was an accident and not a visitation from on high; a disagreeable or churlish or even a dishonest person was somebody to be put up with and not to be moralized on as unscriptural. The worst innkeeper she encountered was a man to avoid in the future rather than a man to convert; she did not seem shocked by a drunken quarrel late one night, but she was annoyed, because she wanted to go to sleep.
She was at times positively frivolous and irreverent in her allusions. Crossing a river one day she was very near to being tipped over.
The canoe was very small and shallow, so that when we were in [it] seemed ready to take in water, which greatly terrified me, and caused me to be very circumspect, sitting with my hands fast on each side, my eyes steady, not daring so much as to lodge my tongue a hair’s breadth more on one side of my mouth than t’ other, nor so much as to think on Lot’s wife; for a wry thought would have overset our wherry.
Her jests about the name of the innkeeper, Mr. Devil, would have landed her in the stocks had she made them publicly in Boston.
The post encouraged me by saying we should be well accommodated at Mr. Devil’s, a few miles further; but I questioned whether we ought to go to the Devil to be helped out of affliction. However, like the rest of the deluded souls that post to the infernal den, we made all possible speed to this Devil’s habitation; where, alighting in good assurance of good accommodations, we were going in.
The accommodations turned out to be anything but good; and she left her host with a sigh of relief, and the thought “He differed only in this from the old fellow in t’ other country – he let us depart,” following the observation with a rimed warning for subsequent travelers to avoid this earthly hell. These are quoted not because they are admirable or worthy of imitation but because they give an indication of what was going on under one very respectable bonnet when Mrs. Knight was sitting decorously in her Boston pew. She was a highly respected woman in the Puritan community. She was accustomed to its ways. There is no word of motherly regret that she was away from her little daughter on Christmas Day, for Christmas was not a festal day in her calendar. Of the people who were coming into manhood and womanhood when Sarah Kemble Knight was born, Hawthorne wrote in “The Scarlet Letter”: “The generation next to the early immigrants wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.”
It was men like the author of the “Magnalia” who had darkened the national visage, but women here and there, like the writer of this Journal, who had already returning gleams of gayety. Of the three people whom we have taken as types of New-England thought at this period, Cotton Mather may fairly be regarded as representing the faith of a declining theology, Samuel Sewall the hope of a broader and more generous civic attitude, and Mrs. Knight as the flicker of charity or warm-hearted and genial fellow-feeling which had been almost extinguished in the seventeenth century.
BOOK LIST
General References
Chamberlain, N. H. Samuel Sewall and the World he Lived in. 1897.
Cobb, S. H. Rise of Religious Liberty in America. 1902.
Dexter, Henry M. The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years as Seen in its Literature. With a bibliographical appendix. 1880. (An excellent history, and indispensable for its bibliographical information.)
Earle, Alice Morse. Child Life in Colonial Days. 1904.
Earle, Alice Morse. Curious Punishments of Bygone Days. 1896 and 1907.
Earle, Alice Morse. Customs and Fashions in Old New England. 1893.
Earle, Alice Morse. Home Life in Colonial Days. 1898.
Earle, Alice Morse. Stage-Coach and Tavern Days. 1900.
Fiske, John. New France and New England, chap. v.
Masson, David. Life of John Milton. 1859–1880. 6 vols. (Valuable for the English backgrounds of Puritanism.)
Richardson, C. F. American Literature, chap. iv.
Tyler, M. C. A History of American Literature. Colonial Period. Vol. I, chaps. xii, xiii.
Walker, W. Ten New England Leaders. 1901.
Wendell, Barrett. Literary History of America, Bk. I, chap. V. 1901.
Individual Authors
Increase Mather. An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences. 1684.
Available Edition
With introductory preface by George Offor. London, 1890.
Collections
Cairns, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 199–216.
Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. I, p. 59.
Stedman and Hutchinson. A Library of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 75–106.
Cotton Mather. The Wonders of the Invisible World. 1693. Magnalia Christi Americana: or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, 1620–1698. 1702.
Available Editions
Magnalia. With notes, translations, and life. 1853. The Wonders, etc. Reprints, Cambridge, 1861, 1862.
Biography and Criticism
Marvin, Rev. A. P. The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. 1892.
Parrington, V. L. Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. I, Bk. I, in chap iii.
Sprague, W. B. Annals of the American Pulpit, Vol. I, pp. 189–195. 1857.
Tyler, M. C. History of American Literature. Colonial Period. Vol. I, chaps. xii, xiii.
Collections
Cairns, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 217–237.
Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 59–66.
Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 114–166.
Samuel Sewall. Diary from 1673 to 1729. The only edition is Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Ser. 5, Vols. VI–VIII.
Collections
Cairns, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 238–251.
Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 188–200.
History and Criticism
Chamberlain, N. H. (See General References.)
Tyler, M. C. (See General References.)
Sarah Kemble Knight. Journals of Madame Knight. From the original manuscripts written in 1704. T. Dwight, editor. 1825.
Available Editions
A Reprint, Albany, 1865.
A Reprint, Norwich, Conn., 1901.
Collection
Stedman