United States or Ireland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
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.
All the townspeople went to look at the house, and while looking marvelled that Jacob Steendam could have thought out such a useful plan, for he was not known as a practical man. Anything but that, for was he not a poet? More than this, was he not the only poet in the colony? And still more than this, he was the first poet of New Amsterdam.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Word Of The Day