Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
If in or outward you are bound,
do not forget to sound.
Neglect of that was cause of this,
to steer amiss.
The seas were calm, the wind was fair,
that made me so secure
that now I must endure
All weathers be they foul or fair.
The winter's cold, the summer's heat
alternatively beat
Upon my bruised sides that rue
because too true
That no relief can ever come.
But why should I despair,
being promised so fair
That there shall be a Day of Doom.48
Smith's fellow promoter-historian William Strachey also wrote at least
one poem superior in quality to his occasional pieces. Like Smith's verses,
it is a meditation upon the approaching dissolution of the author. Preserved
in the Ashmolean Manuscripts in the Bodleian, it is indeed "Mr. Strachie's
Harke." There are again three stanzas, beginning
Harke! Twas the trump of death that blows
My hower is come false world adewe
That I to death untimely goe.
And after a confession of sin and penitence, the writer concludes:
Harke! at which mercy gate I knocke
Let sobbes & sighs the same unlocke
Prostrate I fall & begg for grace
o doe not turne away thy face
my cryinge sinnes beate at thy Throane
Once bowe the heavens looke downe upon
A wretch more overthrowne then griefe
That beggs for mercy not for life.49
George Sandys had written religious verse many years before he came
to America and continued to compose paraphrases of the Latin scriptural
and other devotional poetry in England to his final years. The earliest recorded
verse of this kind appeared in his 1615 A Relation of a Journey
begun Anno: Dam: 1610, his persistently popular account of his travels
in the Mediterranean countries, including Egypt and the Holy Land. When
he was in Jerusalem at Easter, upon visiting the Holy Sepulchre, he was
moved to "dictate this hymne to my Redeemer," a twelve-line poem
beginning