Church.  Sewall was one of the first writers against African slavery, in his brief tract, The Selling of Joseph, printed at Boston in 1700.  His Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica, a mystical interpretation of prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies with America, is remembered only because Whittier, in his Prophecy of Samuel Sewall, has paraphrased one poetic passage which shows a loving observation of nature very rare in our colonial writers.

Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the narrower sense—­that is, of the imaginative representation of life—­there was little or none in the colonial period.  There were no novels, no plays, no satires, and—­until the example of the Spectator had begun to work on this side the water—­no experiments even at the lighter forms of essay-writing, character-sketches, and literary criticism.  There was verse of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term would hardly allow it to be called poetry.  Many of the early divines of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon-writing, of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called “metaphysical poets,” whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New-English muse, the Emblems of Quarles and the Divine Week of Du Bartas, as translated by Sylvester.  The Magnalia contains a number of these things in Latin and English, and is itself well bolstered with complimentary introductions in meter by the author’s friends.  For example: 

  COTTONIUS MATHERUS.

  ANAGRAM.

  Tuos Tecum Ornasti.

“While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise Thine, with thyself thou dost immortalize.  To view the odds thy learned lives invite ’Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite.  But all succeeding ages shall despair A fitting monument for thee to rear.  Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!) Hath given them a lasting writ of ease.”

The epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious in the matter of puns, anagrams, and similar conceits.  The death of the Rev. Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of this sort not to be missed, and his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a “whetstone,” a “loadstone,” an “Ebenezer”—­

  “A stone for kingly David’s use so fit
  As would not fail Goliath’s front to hit,” etc.

The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom (1663), a kind of doggerel Inferno, which went through nine editions, and “was the solace,” says Lowell, “of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to its premonitions of eternal combustion.”  Wigglesworth had