as Indian trails, passed their infancy as cow-paths, and had so wound around marshy tracts and deviated from their course that as streets they must of necessity be irregular and vacillating.
While this was a time of advancement for the little colony, as you may have guessed from the brickmaking venture, yet it was certainly not a literary period. The colonists who had left their homes in Holland to seek their fortunes in a new world had found that Fortune overseas frowned upon them as often as she smiled, and while she had raised the hopes of some, the many were struggling for bare existence. There was no book-making; indeed there were few books of any sort, and reading meant conning over Bibles, prayer-books, psalm-books, and Testaments which had been brought across the ocean. These were stoutly bound volumes, many of them heirlooms, their pages bearing the marks of patient and persistent handling.
The poet Steendam dreamed and thought out many a verse as he stood on the bridge that spanned the canal leading from the bay to the Sheep Pasture—the canal that was one day to be buried deep beneath Broad Street. He must have walked beneath the wall of the weak little fort at the water's edge, passed Governor Stuyvesant's new home that was called Whitehall, and that was to pass away, leaving its name to the road leading to it, which the road was still to bear more than two hundred and fifty years later. And perhaps he went on along the strand to the Stadt Huys (for it was only a few steps farther along the waterside), the stone house that "William the Testy" had built as a tavern and that in the first poet's day had become the first City Hall of New Amsterdam. And he sometimes stood beside the first graveyard, near the plaine that was to become the Bowling Green, and so on to the city wall, with its gates locked while the townsmen slept.
THE STADT HUYS.
Though the streets are to-day much changed from those which the poet walked alone save for the company of his Muse, you can walk them even now, until you come to a thoroughfare noticeable because it is so short and winding, tucked away at the edge of the city's business section. And if you do walk into Stone Street, you must of necessity come to a bend from which both ends of the street curve out of sight, while you stand in a kind of huge well, closed in by iron-shuttered warehouses. Here in this bend you are standing on what was the garden of Jacob Steendam's checker-fronted house. In his day it was Hoogh Street, though in a few years it was to take its present name when it was the first street to be paved with stone.
In those nightly walks through the quiet streets of the sleeping town, the poet Steendam found inspiration for his verses—the first verses ever penned in the colony, and called variously The Praise of New Netherland, The Complaint of New Amsterdam, The Thistle Finch, and others. Although these suggested true affection for the land of his adoption, it was the home of his youth and the never-fading remembrance of his childhood's days that haunted him and called to him. And at last, one day after thirteen years, the sight of a ship preparing to sail for Holland so overcame him that almost within the hour he had bidden farewell and had sailed with her, leaving to the townspeople his memory and his verse.
But by the time of his going there had come forward another poet to take his place, by name Nicasius De Sille. There was a vast difference between the first poet and the second. Steendam was a poor man, and in his verses sought always to touch those who had never grasped the skirts of fleeting Fortune. The second was a man of wealth, a kind of "society poet." For even in that small circle, in the first half-century of its existence, there were marked differences in wealth, birth, and reputation, which were to develop with the passing years into the distinctions of to-day.
The aristocracy of those times centred about the family of the Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant. Mrs. Stuyvesant had been, before her marriage, Judith Bayard, the daughter of a Paris divine. Mrs. Bayard, the sister of Peter Stuyvesant, had married Mrs. Stuyvesant's brother, and when left a widow with three infant sons she followed her brother when he became Governor of New Netherland. These two women had lived in ease and refinement, and in coming to the colony well knew that there they would find a life of comparative hardship. Yet they came willingly enough, following husband and brother, and brought with them an atmosphere of intellectual and social culture that left its impress for all time. By the time Steendam returned to his boyhood home, a few ambitious folk had gathered themselves about the Stuyvesants. There was Oloff Van Cortlandt, a thriving merchant and one of the richest men in New Netherland; there were Hendrick Kip and his three sons; there were Dr. La Montagne and his daughters, and Govert Loockermans, and others.
It was to this well-to-do-set that Nicasius De Sille belonged, and after the going of Steendam he became the only literary man in the colony. He also had come over in the service of the Dutch West India Company, but in a far different capacity from Steendam. For he came, when Stuyvesant's rule had run eight years of its course, as a Councillor in the provincial government, and his life was thenceforth closely connected with that of the Governor. He came, heralded as a statesman, as a lawyer, as a man of deep learning, as a man of wealth. But with not one word of his being a poet—yet only by reason of his poems has his name lived. He built for himself a house beside the little canal where Steendam walked in the night, just where now Exchange Street touches Broad, and here, with his two motherless daughters and one son, he lived more luxuriously than had yet been seen. For he had brought with him from Holland heavy plate of rich design, more plate than was in all the town beside; solid, carved furniture and rare hangings; and on winter nights his guests sat down to a table laden with blue and white china ornamented with strange Chinese pictures, and drank their tea, alternately biting lumps of sugar, from the tiniest china cups, and altogether were entertained with all the pomp and circumstance he had known in The Hague. At these evening entertainments De Sille read his poems in such perfect style as to win much applause, and doubtless it was the reading of these, as well as his courtly manner and great wealth, that very soon won for him the love of fair Tryntie Croegers.
And then one day there was a grand gathering in the stone church inside the fort—on the wedding-day of Nicasius De Sille and Mistress Tryntie Croegers. Into the church went the friends: women, some with petticoats of red cloth, some with skirts of blue or purple silk set off with rare lace, all with silken hoods over much befrizzled hair, and their fingers covered with glittering rings, and with great lockets of gold on their bosoms. Each had a Bible fastened to her girdle by links of gold—not the plain, strongly bound Bibles used by Jacob Steendam and his friends, but elaborately wrought in silver, with golden clasps. The men were just as gaily dressed as the women, for they wore long coats adorned with shining buttons and pockets trimmed with lace, and colored waistcoats, knee-breeches of velvet, silk stockings, and low shoes set off by silver buckles. Outside the fort among the townspeople of lower degree it was, too, quite a holiday. Men with coarse frocks and leather aprons, women in homespun gowns, turbaned negresses, swarthy negro slaves, dusky Indians—all made merry in their several ways as though glad of an excuse. And the motley throng outside the fort and the elegant gathering within all made way for the wrinkled little bell-ringer, who carried the cushions from the Stadt Huys for the burgomasters and the schepens, who insisted on every bit of their dignity, come what would, on this day or on any other. So, with those inside the church looking on in silence and the people outside keeping up an incessant din and clatter, the poet of the rich was married to Tryntie Croegers by the good Dominie Megapolensis.
