Literary New York: Its Landmarks and Associations. Charles Hemstreet

had passed, and the English became governors of their province of New York. Then Stuyvesant went to live in a little settlement he had built up and called Bouwerie Village, which was far out on the Bouwerie Road, and Nicasius De Sille settled down as a merchant, and little more was heard of him as a poet.

      It was a simple enough thing to rename the town and call it after the brother of an English king, but that made but little change in the customs of the people. For many a long year it was to remain the quaint, slow-going town it had been. Certainly no English brain or hand added to the literature of this time, and the only bit of writing which survives is the work of a Dutch minister.

      In the eighteenth year after the coming of the English, when it had come to be 1682, Dominie Henricus Selyns came to New York from Holland. He had lived four years in the town when it was New Amsterdam, and we have his own words for it that he found the settlement scarcely altered a whit from the time he left. And now he took charge of the little church in the fort, the same church where Nicasius De Sille was married with such pomp. His congregation was made up of much the same kind of people as of old, and perhaps it was just as well, since he still preached in the Dutch language. The poems he wrote, all in the Dutch language, were read as piously as were the Bibles, and were quite at one with them in religious feeling. No one then imagined that a day would come when a critic might hint that the good Dominie's contributions to the early literature of New York might be just a shade gloomy and despairing in their views of the fearfulness of the after-life.

      For quite twenty years the good Dominie lived to aid in fostering the infant literature of infant New York, living a life as quiet and as regular as any Dutch colonist could have demanded. On a Sunday morning he preached in the church in the fort the long, heavy sermons that his people loved. In the afternoon he rode away on the highway that led into the country, past the Collect Pond, over the Kissing Bridge at the Fresh Water, on to the stretch that was to grow into the Bowery, through the forest till he came to the few clustering houses of the Bouwerie Village, where Stuyvesant had spent his old age. In the village church he preached of an afternoon—the church which Stuyvesant had built and beside which he was buried—the church which was to stand another hundred years and which was then to give way to a house of worship to be called St. Mark's, which, in turn, two centuries and more after Stuyvesant's day, was still to be found standing in the core of a great metropolis.

      Dominie Selyns lived long enough to see many changes. He lived to see a Dutch prince become England's king; he lived to see New York rent asunder through the overzealousness of one Jacob Leisler, who feared lest the town should not recognize a king of Dutch blood; he lived to see Lord Bellomont made Governor and riding through the streets in a coach the gorgeousness of which astounded all; he lived to see Captain William Kidd sail out of the harbor in the ship Adventure Galley, with never a thought that a few years more would see him executed as a pirate. And when Dominie Selyns died, bequeathing his poems to swell the scanty literature of his times, the era of the Dutch had well-nigh ended.

Chapter II

       Before the Revolution

       Table of Contents

      WHEN William Bradford came to New York, in 1693, the town had grown so large that it must needs have a night-watch—four men who each carried a lantern, and who, strolling through the quiet streets, proclaimed at the start of each hour that the weather was fair, or that the weather was foul, and told beside that all was as well as it should be in those nightly hours. More than this, the town went a step farther towards the making of a metropolis, and lit the streets by night (whether for the benefit of the night-watch or for some other the records say not), by placing on a pole projecting from each seventh house a lantern with a candle in it.

      Pilgrims who year after year seek out the shrines that are connected in one way or another with the literature of the city have worn a path plain to be seen along the stone pavement about Trinity Church, a path leading straight to a bit of greensward where, beside a gravel walk, is the tomb of William Bradford. Although Bradford made slight pretence of being a man of letters, he is remembered as one who loved to foster literature. And, there being little enough left to recall the writings of the seventeenth century, this tombstone has its many visitors. The pilgrims who find their way to it have but half completed their journey. If they leave the churchyard and stray on, not going by way of crowded Wall Street, which would be the direct course, but taking one of the more winding and narrow streets to the south, they will come after a time to a thoroughfare where the structure of the Elevated Road forms a bridge to convey heavy trains that hurry past, stirring the air with constant vibration. In this street, dark even when the sun shines brightest, is another reminder of William Bradford—a tablet in form, but quite as much a tombstone as the other; for its brazen letters tell in true epitaph how he lived here two hundred years gone by, and how here on this spot he set up the first printing-press in the colony, and that here he did the public printing, as well as such books and psalms, tracts and almanacs, and such like things as he had time for. These were all queer, rough-lettered, black-lined pamphlets, and none was more quaint than John Clapp's Almanac, the first which came from the press and the first written in the city.

      John Clapp had time without end to write this almanac, and yet no one ever knew just when he did it. He was the keeper of the inn in the Bouwerie Village, and, having more idle moments than busy ones, he spent most of his time on the broad stoop of the inn, pipe in mouth, looking first at the house where Peter Stuyvesant had lived, then at the dusty road leading away up country towards the King's Bridge in one direction, and down country towards the town. But write it he did, and Bradford printed it, and John Clapp was shrewd enough to advertise himself well by writing in his Table of Contents concerning his tavern: