ode the high hope, the anxiety, the ambition, the eager sympathy, with which all ranks of thoughtful and watchful Englishmen were sending the travellers out upon their great quest. "You brave heroic minds, Worthy your country's name, Whilst loit'ring hinds Lurk here at home with shame, Britons, you stay too long: With vows as strong As the winds that blow you. And cheerfully at sea, Success you still entice, To get the pearl and gold; Virginia, Earth's only paradise. In kenning of the shore, O you the happiest men, Let cannons roar, And in regions far Such heroes bring ye forth, As those from whom we came; And plant our name Under that star Not known unto our north." Thus far in his ode, the poet gives voice merely to the sturdy joy which by nature every Englishman has in daring adventure, in the victories of heroism, in the hope of a vast enlargement of his country's wealth and imperial sway. But this grand old Elizabethan singer could not stifle another ambition-the ambition that England might win for herself in America even nobler trophies than those of political dominion and material wealth. With the pride of an English poet and of an English man of letters, he utters in a single stanza the superb prediction of a new English literature to spring up in that far-off land. In poetic vision he then foresaw, and he hailed and greeted from afar, the unborn poets that were to rise beyond the Atlantic, and, under new constellations as he supposed, were to create a new empire of English letters: CHAPTER II. VIRGINIA: THE FIRST WRITER. I. The arrival in America of the first Americans-A fortunate blunderSatisfaction with their new home. II.-The sort of men they were-Their leaders-Captain John Smith-His previous career-His character-His important relation to early American settlements-The first writer in American literature. III. His first book-Its publication in London in 1608-A literary synchronism-American literature and John Milton-Synopsis of the book— Notable passages-The fable of his rescue by Pocahontas-The place of the book at the head of American literature-Summary of its literary traits. IV. His second American writing-A bold letter to his London patronsHis knowledge refusing to be commanded by their ignorance-The kind of men to make good colonists of Early symptoms of American recalcitrance. V. His third American work-Vivid pictures of Virginia-The climateThe country-The productions-The Indians-His fine statement of the utility of the Virginian enterprise. VI.-Captain John Smith's return to England-His subsequent career—A baffled explorer-His pride in the American colonies-Utilized by the playwrights-Thomas Fuller's sarcastic account of him-His champions -Final estimate. I. THE three little ships which bore so many hopes, dropping from London down the Thames on the 20th of December,1 1606, were vexed by opposing winds and were kept shivering within sight of the English coast for seve ral weeks; then, instead of pursuing the straightforward westerly course to America, they curved southward, meandering foolishly by the Canaries, Dominica, Guadeloupe and elsewhere, to the great loss of time, food, health, and patience; and did not reach their journey's end until the 26th of April, 1607-a journey's end to which they were at last blown by the providence of a rough storm, after 'George Percy, in Purchas, IV. 1685. "the mariners had three days passed their reckoning and found no land." No blunder in man's performance could have been more happily condoned by Heaven's pity; for these poor little ships, groping along the coast of America in great geographic darkness, and seeking only "to find out a safe port in the entrance of some navigable river," were guided by the finger of Him who points out the tracks of the winds and the courses of national destiny, into the noblest bay along the whole coast, and upon a land of balm and verdure. They had come to Virginia at the happy moment when nature in that region wears her sweetest smile and sings her loveliest notes. They were amazed, as one3 of them tells us, at the opulence of life visible all about them; at the oysters "which lay on the ground as thick as stones," many with pearls in them; at the earth "all flowing over with fair flowers of sundry colors and kinds, as though it had been in any garden or orchard in England;" at "the woods full of cedar and cypress trees, with other trees which issue out sweet gums, like to balsam." "Heaven and earth," exclaimed another1 of that delighted company, "never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation." II. Thus began our American civilization; and among those first Englishmen huddled together behind palisadoes in Jamestown in 1607, were some who laid the foundations of American literature. There were about a hundred of them all. As we look over the ancient list of their names and designations, we alight upon some facts which bode little good to an enterprise in which there is no safe room for persons afflicted with constitutional objections to hard 'Capt. J. Smith, "Gen. Hist." I. 150. "From their Instructions, given in Neill, "Hist. Va. Co. Lond." 9. 3 George Percy, in Purchas, IV. 1688. work. The earliest formal History of Virginia1 contains testimony that herein lay the worst peril of the enterprise; that besides one carpenter, two blacksmiths, two sailors, and a few others named "laborers," "all the rest were poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving - men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil a commonwealth than either begin one, or but help to maintain one." But in this heterogeneous party of forcible Feebles, were a few men of some grip and note, such as brave old Bartholomew Gosnold, Edward Maria Wingfield, John Martin, Gabriel Archer, Robert Hunt their saintly chaplain, and George Percy a brother of the Earl of Northumberland. And there was one other man in that little group of adventurers who still has a considerable name in the world. In that year 1607, when he first set foot in Virginia, Captain John Smith was only twenty-seven years old; but even then he had made himself somewhat famous in England as a daring traveller in Southern Europe, in Turkey and the East. He was perhaps the last professional knight-errant that the world saw; a free lance, who could not hear of a fight going on anywhere in the world without hastening to have a hand in it; a sworn champion of the ladies also, all of whom he loved too ardently to be guilty of the invidious offence of marrying any one of them; a restless, vain, ambitious, overbearing, blustering fellow, who made all men either his hot friends or his hot enemies; a man who down to the present hour has his celebrity in the world chiefly on account of alleged exploits among Turks, Tartars, and Indians, of which exploits he alone has furnished the history-never failing to celebrate himself in them all as the one resplendent and invincible hero. This extremely vivid and resolute man comes before us now for particular study, not because he was the most conspicuous person in the first successful American colony, but because he was the writer of the first book in Amer 1 Capt. J. Smith, "Gen. Hist." I. 241. |