the history of American letters. He seems to have been the only one of his generation who realized that the Indian possessed an immortal soul. He devoted his life to the task of winning these souls for Christ. Not only did he learn the Indian tongue, but he translated the entire Bible into the language. The task was a herculean one.
"To learn a language utterly unlike all other tongues, a language never written, and the strange words which seemed inexpressible by letters,—first to learn this new variety of speech, and then to translate the Bible into it, and to do it so carefully that not one idea throughout the holy book should be changed, — this was what the Apostle Eliot did." — Grandfather's Chair.
Eliot's Bible is now the most valuable relic of a vanished race. Aside from its great interest to the ethnologist and the antiquarian, it has the added interest of being the first Bible printed in America. Copies of it are exceedingly rare and costly.
Required Reading. — Hawthorne's Grandfather's Chair, Part I., Ch. 8. Eliot's Brief Narrative of the Progress of the Gospel among the Indians. 1670. Old South Leaflets.
III. POETRY.
A glance at the old Bay Psalm Book is enough to convince any one that the Puritan age was anything but a poetical one. Nevertheless we find among the early colonists many writers of verse, at least two of which were proudly classed by their contemporaries among the great poets of all time. Only these two need be considered here.
