But unto you I shall allow
The easiest room in hell."
In such faith the little Bradstreets were brought up, and the oldest, who became a minister, undoubtedly preached it with the gusto of the time, and quoted the final description of the sufferings of the lost, as an efficient argument with sinners:
"Then might you hear them rend and tear
The air with their outcries;
The hideous noise of their sad voice,
Ascendeth to the skies.
They wring their hands, their cartiff-hands,
And gnash their teeth for terror;
They cry, they roar, for anguish sore,
And gnaw their tongue for horror.
But get away without delay;
Christ pities not your cry;
Depart to hell, there may you yell
And roar eternally.
******
"Die fain they would, if die they could,
But death will not be had;
God's direful wrath their bodies hath
Forever immortal made.
They live to lie in misery
And bear eternal woe;
And live they must whilst God is just
That he may plague them so."
Of the various literary children who may be said to have been nurtured on Anne Bradstreet's verses, three became leaders of New England thought, and all wrote elegies on her death, one of them of marked beauty and power. It remained for a son of the sulphurous Wigglesworth, to leave the purest fragment of poetry the epoch produced, the one flower of a life,
