The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
VOLUME XV. Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I.
§ 12. The Quakers
The same fundamental religious impulse which sustained Robert Barrow on the storm-swept Florida beaches had settled the New England Puritan colonies. This same overwhelming impulse drove into these colonies, half a century after their permanent establishment, a succession of groups of wanderers whose peregrinations left a broad and often bloodstained trail the length of the continent and seaward to the islands. The men and women who made up these groups, called in derision Quakers, wrote as freely as they discoursed, and the spirit that animated them brooked no interference with either speech or progress. The names of several, Mary Dyer, Marmaduke Stevenson, and George Fox, whom Roger Williams “digg’d out of his Burrowes,” to wit Edward Burroughs, are better known, but none of them wrote more forcefully than Alice Curwen.