CHAPTER I.

THE BEGINNING.

I.-The Procession of the first English-speaking colonies from the old world to the new-Our first literary period that of the planting of the American nation-Our first American writers immigrant Americans-True Fathers of American Literature-The literary traits they brought with them. II. Why those first Americans wrote books-True classification of early American writings-Tidings sent back-Controversial appeals-Defences against calumny-Descriptions of the new lands-And of the new life there-Books of religion-Poetry-Histories-Miscellaneous prose. III.-Birth year of American literature-State of English literature when American literature was born-Interest of Englishmen then in their barbaric American empire-Departure from England of the first English Americans-Michael Drayton's farewell ode to them.

THERE is but one thing more interesting than the intellectual history of a man, and that is the intellectual history of a nation. The American people, starting into life in the early part of the seventeenth century, have been busy ever since in recording their intellectual history in laws, manners, institutions, in battles with man and beast and nature, in highways, excavations, edifices, in pictures, in statues, in written words. It is in written words that this people, from the very beginning, have made the most confidential and explicit record of their minds. It is in these written words, therefore, that we shall now search for that record.

I.

We need to picture to ourselves the outgoing of the several English colonies which made their way hither in our earliest time, joining that long, grim, many-tongued procession which during all that era pushed westward from Europe toward this hemisphere. Between the year 1607, when Virginia, the first of these colonies, set its

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timid foot safely down on the American shores, and the year 1682, when the last of them, Pennsylvania, arrived here, we are able to count no less than ten other local communities, of English blood and English speech, that began to find food and lodging and some sense of homecomfort in this land. Their names will never be too despicable to deserve repetition by us: they are, in the order of their establishment, Plymouth, New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, North Carolina, New York, New Jersey, South Carolina. These English colonies of the seventeenth century, which Francis Bacon nobly heralded as " amongst ancient, primitive, and heroical works," were not accidental things: they formed parts of a grand series of popular migrations from the old world to the new, all stimulated by an impulse acting on many nations, and over the space of many years. And so far as it concerned England and that portion of the new world which we now mean by the word America, the impulse just spoken of spent itself in that brave group of colonial enterprises which began with Virginia and ended with Pennsylvania. The present race of Americans who are of English lineage-that is, the most numerous and decidedly the dominant portion of the American people of to-day-are the direct descendants of the crowds of Englishmen who came to America in the seventeenth century. Our first literary period, therefore, fills the larger part of that century in which American civilization had its planting; even as its training into some maturity and power has been the business of the eigh

164 'Essays," XXXIII.—Of Plantations. This essay contains several passages evidently founded upon the author's observation of Virginian affairs as reported in England. In one sentence he expressly mentions Virginia.

2 Within the territory which afterward became the United States was established before the revolution one other English colony, Georgia. Its establishment, however, was in the eighteenth century, and was an isolated event, due to the philanthropy of one good man, who sought to provide in America a refuge for the debtors and paupers of Europe.

teenth and the nineteenth centuries. Of course, also, the most of the men who produced American literature during that period were immigrant authors of English birth and English culture; while the most of those who have produced American literature in the subsequent periods have been authors of American birth and of American culture. Notwithstanding their English birth, these first writers in America were Americans: we may not exclude them from our story of American literature. They founded that literature; they are its Fathers; they stamped their spiritual lineaments upon it; and we shall never deeply enter into the meanings of American literature in its later forms without tracing it back, affectionately, to its beginning with them. At the same time, our first literary epoch cannot fail to bear traces of the fact that nearly all the men who made it were Englishmen who had become Americans merely by removing to America. American life, indeed, at once reacted upon their minds, and began to give its tone and hue to their words; and for every reason, what they wrote here, we rightfully claim as a part of American literature; but England has a right to claim it likewise as a part of English literature. Indeed England and America are joint proprietors of this first tract of the great literary territory which we have undertaken to survey. Ought any one to wonder, however, if in the American literature of the seventeenth century he shall find the distinctive traits, good and bad, which during the same period characterized English literature? How could it be otherwise? Is it likely that an Englishman undergoes a literary revolution by sitting down to write in America instead of in England; or that he will write either much better or much worse only for having sailed across a thousand leagues of brine?

II.

Undoubtedly literature for its own sake was not much thought of, or lived for, in those days. The men and

women of force were putting their force into the strong and most urgent tasks pertaining to this world and the There was an abundance of intellectual vitality among them; and the nation grew

next.

"strong thru shifts, an' wants, an' pains, Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains."

"1

Literature as a fine art, literature as the voice and the ministress of æsthetic delight, they had perhaps little skill in and little regard for; but literature as an instrument of humane and immediate utility, they honored, and at this they wrought with all the earnestness that was born in their blood. They wrote books not because they cared to write books, but because by writing books they could accomplish certain other things which they did care for.

And what were those other things? If we can discover them we shall at once grasp the clue to the right classification and the right interpretation of that still chaotic heap of writings which make up American literature in the colonial age.

I. The task to which those men and women gave themselves the colonization of America-was, under all the circumstances of the time, a very hard one, slow, wearisome, menaced by nearly every form of danger, full of awe even for stout hearts. Their earliest motive for writing books was bound up in a natural and even pathetic desire to send back news of themselves to the old world—that safe, regulated, populous world-which they had left behind them when they sailed out toward the risks and mysteries of the great ocean and of the still greater wilderness which lay hidden in the shadow beyond it. This gives us our first group of American writings, and explains for us a multitude of titles in that primal period-the

1 1 James Russell Lowell, "The Biglow Papers," Second Series, 68.