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of his pieces, which might well be spoken of the aged and dead tree-trunk, upon which we were sitting.
And when we did all desire to know their import, she repeated them thus:–
There when we did sit down,
Yea, even then we mourned when
We remembered Sion.
Our harp we did hang it amid
Upon the willow-tree;
Because there they that us away
Led to captivity
Required of us a song, and thus
Asked mirth us waste who laid,
Sure thou didst flourish once, and many springs,These lines, she said, were written by one Vaughn, a Brecknockshire Welsh Doctor of Medicine, who had printed a little book not many years ago. Mr. Richardson said the lines were good, but that he did hold the reading of ballads and the conceits of rhymers a waste of time, to say nothing worse. Sir Thomas hereat said that, as far as he could judge, the worthy folk of New England had no great temptation to that sin from their own poets, and did then, in a drolling tone, repeat some verses of the 137th Psalm, which he said were the best he had seen in the Cambridge Psalm Book:— The rivers on of Babylon,
Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers,
Passed o'er thy head; many light hearts and wings,
Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers.
And still a new succession sings and flies,
Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot
Towards the old and still enduring skies,
While the low violet thriveth at their root.
There when we did sit down,
Yea, even then we mourned when
We remembered Sion.
Our harp we did hang it amid
Upon the willow-tree;
Because there they that us away
Led to captivity
Required of us a song, and thus
Asked mirth us waste who laid,
