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Title: Initial Studies in American Letters


Author: Henry A. Beers

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INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS

by

HENRY A. BEERS

New York
Chautauqua Press
C. L. S. C. Department, 150 Fifth Avenue

1891







The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by a Council of
Six.  It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not
involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every
principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended.





PREFACE.

This volume is intended as a companion to the historical sketch of
English literature, entitled _From Chaucer to Tennyson_, published last
year for the Chautauqua Circle.  In writing it I have followed the same
plan, aiming to present the subject in a sort of continuous essay
rather than in the form of a "primer" or elementary manual.  I have not
undertaken to describe, or even to mention, every American author or
book of importance, but only those which seemed to me of most
significance.  Nevertheless I believe that the sketch contains enough
detail to make it of some use as a guide-book to our literature.
Though meant to be mainly a history of American _belles-lettres_, it
makes some mention of historical and political writings, but hardly any
of philosophical, scientific, and technical works.

A chronological rather than a topical order has been followed, although
the fact that our best literature is of recent growth has made it
impossible to adhere as closely to a chronological plan as in the
English sketch.  In the reading courses appended to the different
chapters I have named a few of the most important authorities in
American literary history, such as Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and
Richardson.  My thanks are due to the authors and publishers who have
kindly allowed me the use of copyrighted matter for the appendix,
especially to Mr. Park Godwin and Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. for the
passages from Bryant; to Messrs. A. O.  Armstrong & Son for the
selections from Poe; to the Rev. E. E. Hale and Messrs. Roberts
Brothers for the extract from _The Man Without a Country_; to Walt
Whitman for his two poems; and to Mr. Clemens and the American
Publishing Co. for the passage from _The Jumping Frog_.

HENRY A. BEERS.





CONTENTS.

  CHAPTER I.
  THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1607-1765

  CHAPTER II.
  THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD, 1765-1815

  CHAPTER III.
  THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION, 1815-1837

  CHAPTER IV.
  THE CONCORD WRITERS, 1837-1861

  CHAPTER V.
  THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS, 1837-1861

  CHAPTER VI.
  LITERATURE IN THE CITIES, 1837-1861

  CHAPTER VII.
  LITERATURE SINCE 1861

  APPENDIX.




INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS.


CHAPTER I.

THE COLONIAL PERIOD.

1607-1765.

The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as
history than as literature.  It would be unfair to judge of the
intellectual vigor of the English colonists in America by the books
that they wrote; those "stern men with empires in their brains" had
more pressing work to do than the making of books.  The first settlers,
indeed, were brought face to face with strange and exciting
conditions--the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and fauna
of a new world--things which seem stimulating to the imagination, and
incidents and experiences which might have lent themselves easily to
poetry or romance.  Of all these they wrote back to England reports
which were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon the whole,
hardly rise into the region of literature.  "New England," said
Hawthorne, "was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at
present."  But to a contemporary that old New England of the
seventeenth century doubtless seemed any thing but picturesque, filled
with grim, hard, work-day realities.  The planters both of Virginia and
Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and starvation, constantly
threatened by Indian Wars, and troubled by quarrels among themselves
and fears of disturbance from England.  The wrangles between the royal
governors and the House of Burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the
theological squabbles in New England, which fill our colonial records,
are petty and wearisome to read of.  At least, they would be so did we
not bear in mind to what imperial destinies those conflicts were slowly
educating the little communities which had hardly yet secured a
foothold on the edge of the raw continent.

Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements,
when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and
commerce was building up large towns, and there were wealth and
generous living and fine society, the "good old colony days when we
lived under the king," had yielded little in the way of literature that
is of any permanent interest.  There would seem to be something in the
relation of a colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and
art of the former to a helpless provincialism.   Canada and Australia
are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the thirteen
colonies at the time of their separation from England.  They have
cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well-equipped
universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public buildings, all the
outward appliances of an advanced civilization; and yet what have
Canada and Australia contributed to British literature?

American literature had no infancy.  That engaging _naivete_ and that
heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs
of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil.  Instead of
emerging from the twilight of the past the first American writings were
produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age.
Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial
literature.  The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge
to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on
imitating the cast-off literary fashions of the mother-country.
America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the
greatest names in English literature.  Jamestown was planted in 1607,
nine years before Shakespeare's death, and the hero of that enterprise,
Captain John Smith, may not improbably have been a personal
acquaintance of the great dramatist.  "They have acted my fatal
tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith.  Many circumstances in _The
Tempest_ were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the _Sea Venture_ on
"the still vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his
_True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates_,
written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1610.  Shakespeare's
contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the _Polyolbion_, addressed
a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic
minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize Virginia, an ode
which ended with the prophecy of a future American literature:

 "And as there plenty grows
  Of laurel every-where--
  Apollo's sacred tree--
  You it may see
  A poet's brows
  To crown, that may sing there."

Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of the _Civil Wars_,
had also prophesied in a similar strain:

  "And who in time knows whither we may vent
    The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores . . .
  What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
    May come refined with accents that are ours?"

It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, and Walter
Raleigh might have been reckoned among the poets of America.  He was
one of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, and he made
voyages in person to Newfoundland and Guiana.  And more unlikely things
have happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he
should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and the colonists of
Massachusetts Bay, who had sailed two years before.  Sir Henry Vane,
the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend--

  "Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old"--

came over in 1635, and was for a short time governor of Massachusetts.
These are idle speculations, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver
Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was
prevented by the king's officers, we may, for the nonce, "let our frail
thoughts dally with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a chance
_Paradise Lost_ missed being written in Boston.  But, as a rule, the
members of the literary guild are not quick to emigrate.  They like the
feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, a state of society
which America has only begun to reach during the present century.

Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the "two great distributing
centers of the English race."  The men who colonized the country
between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from
the literary or bookish classes in the old country.  Many of the first
settlers were gentlemen--too many, Captain Smith thought, for the good
of the plantation.  Some among these were men of worth and spirit, "of
good means and great parentage."  Such was, for example, George Percy,
a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the
original adventurers, and the author of _A Discourse of the Plantation
of the Southern Colony of Virginia_, which contains a graphic narrative
of the fever and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown.  But many of these
gentlemen were idlers, "unruly gallants, packed thither by their
friends to escape ill destinies," dissipated younger sons, soldiers of
fortune, who came over after the gold which was supposed to abound in
the new country, and who spent their time in playing bowls and drinking
at the tavern as soon as there was any tavern.  With these was a
sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, and the
on-scourings of the London streets, fruit of press-gangs and jail
deliveries, sent over to "work in the plantations."

Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very favorable to
literary growth.  The planters lived isolated on great estates which
had water-fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesapeake.  There
the tobacco, the chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon
the trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the
plantations.  Surrounded by his slaves, and visited occasionally by a
distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived a free and
careless life.  He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and
cock-fighting.  There were no large towns, and the planters met each
other mainly on occasion of a county court or the assembling of the
Burgesses.  The court-house was the nucleus of social and political
life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in New England.  In such a
state of society schools were necessarily few, and popular education
did not exist.  Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal governor of the
colony from 1641 to 1677, said, in 1670, "I thank God there are no free
schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred
years."  In the matter of printing this pious wish was well-nigh
realized.  The first press set up in the colony, about 1681, was soon
suppressed, and found no successor until the year 1729.  From that date
until some ten years before the Revolution one printing-press answered
the needs of Virginia, and this was under official control.  The
earliest newspaper in the colony was the _Virginia Gazette_,
established in 1736.

In the absence of schools the higher education naturally languished.
Some of the planters were taught at home by tutors, and others went to
England and entered the universities.  But these were few in number,
and there was no college in the colony until more than half a century
after the foundation of Harvard in the younger province of
Massachusetts.  The college of William and Mary was established at
Williamsburg chiefly by the exertions of the Rev. James Blair, a Scotch
divine, who was sent by the Bishop of London as "commissary" to the
Church in Virginia.  The college received its charter in 1693, and held
its first commencement in 1700.  It is perhaps significant of the
difference between the Puritans of New England and the so-called
"Cavaliers" of Virginia, that while the former founded and supported
Harvard College in 1636, and Yale in 1701, of their own motion and at
their own expense, William and Mary received its endowment from the
crown, being provided for in part by a deed of lands and in part by a
tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from the colony.  In
return for this royal grant the college was to present yearly to the
king two copies of Latin verse.  It is reported of the young Virginian
gentlemen who resorted to the new college that they brought their
plantation manners with them, and were accustomed to "keep race-horses
at the college, and bet at the billiard or other gaming-tables."
William and Mary College did a good work for the colony, and educated
some of the great Virginians of the Revolutionary era, but it has never
been a large or flourishing institution, and has held no such relation
to the intellectual development of its section as Harvard and Yale have
held in the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut.  Even after the
foundation of the University of Virginia, in which Jefferson took a
conspicuous part, Southern youths were commonly sent to the North for
their education, and at the time of the outbreak of the civil war there
was a large contingent of Southern students in several Northern
colleges, notably in Princeton and Yale.

Naturally, the first books written in America were descriptions of the
country and narratives of the vicissitudes of the infant settlements,
which were sent home to be printed for the information of the English
public and the encouragement of further immigration.  Among books of
this kind produced in Virginia the earliest and most noteworthy were
the writings of that famous soldier of fortune, Captain John Smith.
The first of these was his _True Relation_, namely, "of such
occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since
the first planting of that colony," printed at London in 1608.  Among
Smith's other books the most important is perhaps his _General History
of Virginia_ (London, 1624), a compilation of various narratives by
different hands, but passing under his name.  Smith was a man of a
restless and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of
contradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious nature, with an appetite
for the marvelous and a disposition to draw the longbow.  He had seen
service in many parts of the world, and his wonderful adventures lost
nothing in the telling.  It was alleged against him that the evidence
of his prowess rested almost entirely on his own testimony.  His
truthfulness in essentials has not, perhaps, been successfully
impugned, but his narratives have suffered by the embellishments with
which he has colored them; and, in particular, the charming story of
Pocahontas saving his life at the risk of her own--the one romance of
early Virginian history--has passed into the realm of legend.

Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart from the
interest of the events which they describe and the diverting but
forcible personality which they unconsciously display.  They are the
rough-hewn records of a busy man of action, whose sword was mightier
than his pen.  As Smith returned to England after two years in
Virginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settlement
of which he had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be
claimed as an American author.  No more can Mr. George Sandys, who came
to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyat, in 1621, and completed his
excellent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, in
the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, "limned" as he writes "by
that imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and
repose, having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the
muses."  Sandys went back to England for good probably as early as
1625, and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the first American
poet, on the strength of his paraphrase of the _Metamorphoses_, than he
can be reckoned the earliest Yankee inventor because he "introduced the
first water-mill into America."

The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern colonies which
took their point of departure from Virginia, is almost wholly of this
historical and descriptive kind.  A great part of it is concerned with
the internal affairs of the province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in
1676, one of the most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary
annals, and of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them
anonymous, and only rescued from a manuscript condition a hundred years
after the event.  Another part is concerned with the explorations of
new territory.  Such were the "Westover Manuscripts," left by Colonel
William Byrd, who was appointed in 1729 one of the commissioners to fix
the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, and gave an account
of the survey in his _History of the Dividing Line_, which was printed
only in 1841.  Colonel Byrd is one of the most brilliant figures of
colonial Virginia, and a type of the Old Virginia gentleman.  He had
been sent to England for his education, where he was admitted to the
bar of the Middle Temple, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and
formed an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrery.
He held many offices in the government of the colony, and founded the
cities of Richmond and Petersburg.  His estates were large, and at
Westover--where he had one of the finest private libraries in
America--he exercised a baronial hospitality, blending the usual
profusion of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled scholar
and "picked man of countries."  Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in
literature.  His _History of the Dividing Line_ is written with a
jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor, and which gives to
the painful journey through the wilderness the air of a holiday
expedition.  Similar in tone were his diaries of _A Progress to the
Mines_ and _A Journey to the Land of Eden_ in North Carolina.

The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverly, "a native
and inhabitant of the place," whose _History of Virginia_ was printed
at London in 1705.  Beverly was a rich planter and large slave-owner,
who, being in London in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the
manuscript of a forthcoming work, Oldmixon's _British Empire in
America_.  Beverly was set upon writing his history by the inaccuracies
in this, and likewise because the province "has been so misrepresented
to the common people of England as to make them believe that the
servants in Virginia are made to draw in cart and plow, and that the
country turns all people black"--an impression which lingers still in
parts of Europe.  The most original portions of the book are those in
which the author puts down his personal observations of the plants and
animals of the New World, and particularly the account of the Indians,
to which his third book is devoted, and which is accompanied by
valuable plates.  Beverly's knowledge of these matters was evidently at
first hand, and his descriptions here are very fresh and interesting.
The more strictly historical part of his work is not free from
prejudice and inaccuracy.  A more critical, detailed, and impartial,
but much less readable, work was William Stith's _History of the First
Discovery and Settlement of Virginia_, 1747, which brought the subject
down only to the year 1624.  Stith was a clergyman, and at one time a
professor in William and Mary College.

The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmen.  The Church of
England was established by law, and non-conformity was persecuted in
various ways.  Three missionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by
the Puritans of New England, two from Braintree, Massachusetts, and one
from New Haven.  They were not suffered to preach, but many resorted to
them in private houses, until, being finally driven out by fines and
imprisonments, they took refuge in Catholic Maryland.  The Virginia
clergy were not, as a body, very much of a force in education or
literature.  Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed
condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the
wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their passion
for gaming and hunting.  Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander
Whitaker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to
the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in furtherance
of those ends _Good News from Virginia_, in 1613, three years before
his death by drowning in the James River.

The conditions were much more favorable for the production of a
literature in New England than in the southern colonies.  The free and
genial existence of the "Old Dominion" had no counterpart among the
settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have
been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a different
way of thinking.  But their intensity of character, their respect for
learning, and the heroic mood which sustained them through the
hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in
their own writings.  If these are not so much literature as the raw
materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate in finding
interpreters among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has done
for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, Whittier,
Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and
romance over the lives of the founders of New England.

Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, quotes the following passage from one
of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of
Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual
intellectual event of the colony:

"The question was often put unto our predecessors, _What went ye out
into the wilderness to see_?  And the answer to it is not only too
excellent but too notorious to be dissembled. . . .  We came hither
because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full
dispensations of the Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of
ourselves."  The New England colonies were, in fact, theocracies.
Their leaders were clergymen, or laymen whose zeal for the faith was no
whit inferior to that of the ministers themselves.  Church and State
were one.  The freeman's oath was only administered to church members,
and there was no place in the social system for unbelievers or
dissenters.  The pilgrim fathers regarded their transplantation to the
New World as an exile, and nothing is more touching in their written
records than the repeated expressions of love and longing toward the
old home which they had left, and even toward that Church of England
from which they had sorrowfully separated themselves.  It was not in
any light or adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea
and the wilderness.  "This howling wilderness," "these ends of the
earth," "these goings down of the sun," are some of the epithets which
they constantly applied to the land of their exile.  Nevertheless they
had come to stay, and, unlike Smith and Percy and Sandys, the early
historians and writers of New England cast in their lots permanently
with the new settlements.  A few, indeed, went back after 1640--Mather
says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first "classis" or
immigration were among them--when the victory of the Puritanic party in
Parliament opened a career for them in England, and made their presence
there seem in some cases a duty.  The celebrated Hugh Peters, for
example, who was afterward Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, and was beheaded
after the Restoration, went back in 1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward,
the minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author of a quaint book
against toleration, entitled _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_; written in
America and published shortly after its author's arrival in England.
The civil war, too, put a stop to further emigration from England until
after the Restoration in 1660.

The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men of the middle
class, artisans and husbandmen, the most useful members of a new
colony.  But their leaders were clergymen educated at the universities,
and especially at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the great Puritan
college; their civil magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of
education and substance, like the elder Winthrop, who was learned in
law, and Theophilus Eaton, first governor of New Haven, who was a
London merchant of good estate.  It is computed that there were in New
England during the first generation as many university graduates as in
any community of equal population in the old country.  Almost the first
care of the settlers was to establish schools.  Every town of fifty
families was required by law to maintain a common school, and every
town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin school.  In 1636, only
sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock,
Harvard College was founded at Newtown, whose name was thereupon
changed to Cambridge, the General Court held at Boston on September 8,
1630, having already advanced 400 pounds "by way of essay towards the
building of something to begin a college."  "An university," says
Mather, "which hath been to these plantations, for the good literature
there cultivated, _sal Gentium_, . . .  and a river without the streams
whereof these regions would have been mere unwatered places for the
devil."  By 1701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot, Yale
College at New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Connecticut
plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college at their
own doors.  A printing-press was set up at Cambridge in 1639, which was
under the oversight of the university authorities, and afterward of
licensers appointed by the civil power.  The press was no more free in
Massachusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed
printing" for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his
_Areopagitica_, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New England until some
twenty years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.  "The
Freeman's Oath" and an almanac were issued from the Cambridge press in
1639, and in 1640 the first English book printed in America, a
collection of the psalms in meter, made by various ministers, and known
as the _Bay Psalm Book_.  The poetry of this version was worse, if
possible, than that of Sternhold and Hopkins's famous rendering; but it
is noteworthy that one of the principal translators was that devoted
"Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63,
translated the Bible into the Algonquin tongue.  Eliot hoped and toiled
a life-time for the conversion of those "salvages," "tawnies,"
"devil-worshipers," for whom our early writers have usually nothing but
bad words.  They have been destroyed instead of converted; but his (so
entitled) _Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone
Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament_--the first Bible printed in
America--remains a monument of missionary zeal and a work of great
value to students of the Indian languages.

A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the history of
old New England, it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there, and
the landscape was always dark and wintry.  Such is the impression which
one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's and
Winthrop's Journals, or Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_--an
impression of gloom, of flight and cold, of mysterious fears besieging
the infant settlements scattered in a narrow fringe "between the
groaning forest and the shore."  The Indian terror hung over New
England for more than half a century, or until the issue of King
Philip's War, in 1670, relieved the colonists of any danger of a
general massacre.  Added to this were the perplexities caused by the
earnest resolve of the settlers to keep their New-England Eden free
from the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in
religion.  The Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and
conservative Puritanism.  The later and more grotesque out-crops of the
movement in the old England found no toleration in the new.  But these
refugees for conscience' sake were compelled in turn to persecute
Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and
later, Quakers, and still later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into their
precincts and troubled the churches with "prophesyings" and novel
opinions.  Some of those were banished, others were flogged or
imprisoned, and a few were put to death.  Of the exiles the most
noteworthy was Roger Williams, an impetuous, warm-hearted man, who was
so far in advance of his age as to deny the power of the civil
magistrate in cases of conscience, or who, in other words, maintained
the modern doctrine of the separation of Church and State.  Williams
was driven away from the Massachusetts colony--where he had been
minister of the church at Salem--and with a few followers fled into the
southern wilderness and settled at Providence.  There, and in the
neighboring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he obtained a
charter, he established his patriarchal rule and gave freedom of
worship to all comers.  Williams was a prolific writer on theological
subjects, the most important of his writings being, perhaps, his
_Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, 1644, and a supplement to the same
called out by a reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. John
Cotton, minister of the First Church at Boston, entitled _The Bloody
Tenent Washed and made White in the Blood of the Lamb_.  Williams was
also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he thought, should not be
taken from them without payment, and he anticipated Eliot by writing,
in 1643, a _Key into the Language of America_.  Although at odds with
the theology of Massachusetts Bay, Williams remained in correspondence
with Winthrop and others in Boston, by whom he was highly esteemed.  He
visited England in 1643 and 1652, and made the acquaintance of John
Milton.

Besides the threat of an Indian war and their anxious concern for the
purity of the Gospel in their churches, the colonists were haunted by
superstitious forebodings of the darkest kind.  It seemed to them that
Satan, angered by the setting up of the kingdom of the saints in
America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among them,
sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt.  Special
providences and unusual phenomena, like earth quakes, mirages, and the
northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others
as portents of supernatural persecutions.  Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson,
the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor,
been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open
assembly, at Boston, upon a lecture day, "thereupon gathered that it
might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness."  "There
will be an unusual range of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a
little before the second coming of our Lord.  The evening wolves will
be much abroad when we are near the evening of the world."  This belief
culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, that
"spectral puppet play," which, beginning with the malicious pranks of a
few children who accused certain uncanny old women and other persons of
mean condition and suspected lives of having tormented them with magic,
gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest character, and
resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen people.  Many of the
possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition of a little
black man, who urged them to inscribe their names in a red book which
he carried--a sort of muster-roll of those who had forsworn God's
service for the devil's.  Others testified to having been present at
meetings of witches in the forest.  It is difficult now to read without
contempt the "evidence" which grave justices and learned divines
considered sufficient to condemn to death men and women of unblemished
lives.  It is true that the belief in witchcraft was general at that
time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases of
witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe.
Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_, 1635, affirmed his belief
in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of
atheist."  But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and
executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of
intelligence in the community in which these were held.  It would be
well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what
things were done in New England in the name of faith less than two
hundred years ago.  It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts
Puritans of the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held no
beautiful suggestion; to them it was simply a grim and hideous
wilderness, whose dark aisles were the ambush of prowling savages and
the rendezvous of those other "devil-worshipers" who celebrated there a
kind of vulgar Walpurgis night.

The most important of original sources for the history of the
settlement of New England are the journals of William Bradford, first
governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, the second governor of
Massachusetts, which hold a place corresponding to the writings of
Captain John Smith in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober and
trustworthy.  Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_ covers the
period from 1620 to 1646.  The manuscript was used by later annalists
but remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost
during the War of the Revolution and recovered long afterward in
England.  Winthrop's Journal, or _History of New England_, begun on
shipboard in 1630, and extending to 1649, was not published entire
until 1826.  It is of equal authority with Bradford's, and perhaps, on
the whole the more important of the two, as the colony of Massachusetts
Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly outwent Plymouth in wealth and
population, though not in priority of settlement.  The interest of
Winthrop's Journal lies in the events that it records rather than in
any charm in the historian's manner of recording them.  His style is
pragmatic, and some of the incidents which he gravely notes are trivial
to the modern mind, though instructive as to our forefathers' way of
thinking.  For instance, of the year 1632: "At Watertown there was (in
the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a
snake, and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake.
The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of
it, gave this interpretation: that the snake was the devil, the mouse
was a poor, contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which
should overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom."  The
reader of Winthrop's Journal comes every-where upon hints which the
imagination has since shaped into poetry and romance.  The germs of
many of Longfellow's _New England Tragedies_, of Hawthorne's _Maypole
of Merrymount_, and _Endicott's Red Cross_, and of Whittier's _John
Underhill_ and _The Familists' Hymn_ are all to be found in some dry,
brief entry of the old Puritan diarist.  "Robert Cole, having been oft
punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his
neck for a year," to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to
the greatest American romance, _The Scarlet Letter_.  The famous
apparition of the phantom ship in New Haven harbor, "upon the top of
the poop a man standing with one hand akimbo under his left side, and
in his right hand a sword stretched out toward the sea," was first
chronicled by Winthrop under the year 1648.  This meteorological
phenomenon took on the dimensions of a full-grown myth some forty years
later, as related, with many embellishments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of
New Haven, in a letter to Cotton Mather.  Winthrop put great faith in
special providences, and among other instances narrates, not without a
certain grim satisfaction, how "the _Mary Rose_, a ship of Bristol, of
about 200 tons," lying before Charleston, was blown in pieces with her
own powder, being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of God
appeared, "for the master and company were many of them profane
scoffers at us and at the ordinances of religion here."  Without any
effort at dramatic portraiture or character-sketching, Winthrop managed
in all simplicity, and by the plain relation of facts, to leave a clear
impression of many prominent figures in the first Massachusetts
immigration.  In particular there gradually arises from the entries in
his diary a very distinct and diverting outline of Captain John
Underhill, celebrated in Whittier's poem.  He was one of the few
professional soldiers who came over with the Puritan fathers, such as
John Mason, the hero of the Pequot War, and Miles Standish, whose
_Courtship_ Longfellow sang.  He had seen service in the Low Countries,
and in pleading the privilege of his profession "he insisted much upon
the liberty which all States do allow to military officers for free
speech, etc., and that himself had spoken sometimes as freely to Count
Nassau."  Captain Underhill gave the colony no end of trouble, both by
his scandalous living and his heresies in religion.  Having been
seduced into Familistical opinions by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who was
banished for her beliefs, he was had up before the General Court and
questioned, among other points, as to his own report of the manner of
his conversion.  "He had lain under a spirit of bondage and a legal way
for years, and could get no assurance, till, at length, as he was
taking a pipe of tobacco, the Spirit set home an absolute promise of
free grace with such assurance and joy as he never since doubted of his
good estate, neither should he, though he should fall into sin. . . .
The Lord's day following he made a speech in the assembly, showing that
as the Lord was pleased to convert Paul as he was in persecuting, etc.,
so he might manifest himself to him as he was taking the moderate use
of the creature called tobacco."  The gallant captain, being banished
the colony, betook himself to the falls of the Piscataquack (Exeter,
N.H.), where the Rev. John Wheelwright, another adherent of Mrs.
Hutchinson, had gathered a congregation.  Being made governor of this
plantation, Underhill sent letters to the Massachusetts magistrates,
breathing reproaches and imprecations of vengeance.  But meanwhile it
was discovered that he had been living in adultery at Boston with a
young woman whom he had seduced, the wife of a cooper, and the captain
was forced to make public confession, which he did with great unction
and in a manner highly dramatic.  "He came in his worst clothes (being
accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness), without a
band, in a foul linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and standing
upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs and abundance of tears, lay
open his wicked course."  There is a lurking humor in the grave
Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's doings.  Winthrop's own
personality comes out well in his Journal.  He was a born leader of
men, a _conditor imperii_, just, moderate, patient, wise; and his
narrative gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of the general
prudence and fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their
dealings with one another, with the Indians, and with the neighboring
plantations.

Considering our forefathers' errand and calling into this wilderness,
it is not strange that their chief literary staples were sermons and
tracts in controversial theology.  Multitudes of these were written and
published by the divines of the first generation, such as John Cotton,
Thomas Shepard, John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the
founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that "when he was doing
his Master's business he would put a king into his pocket."  Nor were
their successors in the second or the third generation any less
industrious and prolific.  They rest from their labors and their works
do follow them.  Their sermons and theological treatises are not
literature: they are for the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but
they exhibit great learning, logical acuteness, and an earnestness
which sometimes rises into eloquence.  The pulpit ruled New England,
and the sermon was the great intellectual engine of the time.  The
serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to
religion; the other world was all their art.  The daily secular events
of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were
important enough to find record in print only in so far as they
manifested God's dealings with his people.  So much was the sermon
depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom
of serious-minded laymen to take down the words of the discourse in
their note-books.  Franklin, in his _Autobiography_, describes this as
the constant habit of his grandfather, Peter Folger; and Mather, in his
life of the elder Winthrop, says that "tho' he wrote not after the
preacher, yet such was his _attention_ and such his _retention_ in
hearing, that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had
heard in the congregation."  These discourses were commonly of great
length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pulpit hour-glass was silently
inverted while the orator pursued his theme even unto "fourteenthly."

The book which best sums up the life and thought of this old New
England of the seventeenth century is Cotton Mather's _Magnalia Christi
Americana_.  Mather was by birth a member of that clerical aristocracy
which developed later into Dr. Holmes's "Brahmin Caste of New England."
His maternal grandfather was John Cotton.  His father was Increase
Mather, the most learned divine of his generation in New England,
minister of the North Church of Boston, President of Harvard College,
and author, _inter alia_, of that characteristically Puritan book, _An
Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_.  Cotton Mather
himself was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of diligence.  He was
graduated from Harvard at fifteen.  He ordered his daily life and
conversation by a system of minute observances.  He was a book-worm,
whose life was spent between his library and his pulpit, and his
published works number upward of three hundred and eighty.  Of these
the most important is the _Magnalia_, 1702, an ecclesiastical history
of New England from 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I.
Antiquities; II. Lives of the Governors; III. Lives of Sixty Famous
Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies of its
eminent graduates; V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith; VI. Wonderful
Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord--that is, an account of the
Afflictions and Disturbances of the Churches and the Conflicts with the
Indians.  The plan of the work thus united that of Fuller's _Worthies
of England_ and _Church History_ with that of Wood's _Athenae
Oxonienses_ and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_.

Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers
used.  He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but, as literary
fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the mother-country,
that nimble English which Dryden and the Restoration essayists
introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manner.
Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Brown,
Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with
allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the
Greek and the Latin.  A page of the _Magnalia_ is almost as richly
mottled with italics as one from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the
quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself
in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his
books and chapters.  He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having "_angled_
many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs.
Hutchinson's surname into "the non-such;" and having occasion to speak
of Mr. Urian Oakes's election to the presidency of Harvard College,
enlarges upon the circumstance as follows:

"We all know that _Britain_ knew nothing more famous than their ancient
sect of DRUIDS; the philosophers, whose order, they say, was instituted
by one _Samothes_, which is in English as much as to say, an heavenly
man.  The _Celtic_ name, _Deru_, for an Oak was that from whence they
received their denomination; as at this very day the _Welch_ call this
tree _Drew_, and this order of men _Derwyddon_.  But there are no small
antiquaries who derive this oaken religion and philosophy from the
_Oaks of Mamre_, where the Patriarch _Abraham_ had as well a dwelling
as an _altar_.  That _Oaken-Plain_ and the eminent OAK under which
_Abraham_ lodged was extant in the days of _Constantine_, as _Isidore_,
_Jerom_, and _Sozomen_ have assured us.  Yea, there are shrewd
probabilities that _Noah_ himself had lived in this very _Oak-plain_
before him; for this very place was called _Ogge_ [see Transcriber's
Note #1 at end of chapter], which was the name of _Noah_, so styled
from the _Oggyan_ (_subcineritiis panibus_) sacrifices, which he did
use to offer in this renowned _Grove_.  And it was from this example
that the ancients, and particularly that the Druids of the nations,
chose _oaken_ retirements for their studies.  Reader, let us now, upon
another account, behold the students of _Harvard College_, as a
rendezvous of happy _Druids_, under the influences of so rare a
president.  But, alas! our joy must be short-lived, for on _July_ 25,
1681, the stroke of a sudden death felled the _tree_,

  "Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes
  Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cypressi.

"Mr. _Oakes_ thus being transplanted into the better world the
presidentship was immediately tendered unto _Mr. Increase Mather_."

This will suffice as an example of the bad taste and laborious pedantry
which disfigured Mather's writing.  In its substance the book is a
perfect thesaurus; and inasmuch as nothing is unimportant in the
history of the beginnings of such a nation as this is and is destined
to be, the _Magnalia_ will always remain a valuable and interesting
work.  Cotton Mather, born in 1663, was of the second generation of
Americans, his grandfather being of the immigration, but his father a
native of Dorchester, Mass.  A comparison of his writings and of the
writings of his contemporaries with the works of Bradford, Winthrop,
Hooker, and others of the original colonists, shows that the simple and
heroic faith of the Pilgrims had hardened into formalism and doctrinal
rigidity.  The leaders of the Puritan exodus, notwithstanding their
intolerance of errors in belief, were comparatively broad-minded men.
They were sharers in a great national movement, and they came over when
their cause was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the eve of its
coming triumph at home.  After the Restoration, in 1660, the currents
of national feeling no longer circulated so freely through this distant
member of the body politic, and thought in America became more
provincial.  The English dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage
as compared with the Church of England, had the great benefit of living
at the center of national life, and of feeling about them the pressure
of vast bodies of people who did not think as they did.  In New
England, for many generations, the dominant sect had things all its own
way--a condition of things which is not healthy for any sect or party.
Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear in their writings very
much like so many Puritan bishops, jealous of their prerogatives,
magnifying their apostolate, and careful to maintain their authority
over the laity.  Mather had an appetite for the marvelous, and took a
leading part in the witchcraft trials, of which he gave an account in
his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, 1693.  To the quaint pages of the
_Magnalia_ our modern authors have resorted as to a collection of
romances or fairy tales.  Whittier, for example, took from thence the
subject of his poem _The Garrison of Cape Anne_; and Hawthorne embodied
in _Grandfather's Chair_ the most elaborate of Mather's biographies.
This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor
shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal
governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures
in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef near Port de
la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with
talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and "pieces of
eight."

Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief-Justice of
Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, who is
intimately known through his Diary, kept from 1673 to 1729.  This has
been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pepys, which it
resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its
self-revelation, but to which it is as much inferior in historic
interest as "the petty province here" was inferior in political and
social importance to "Britain far away."  For the most part it is a
chronicle of small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae of his
domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such haps
as this: "March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret."  But it also
affords instructive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip's
War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, etc.  It
bears about the same relation to New England history at the close of
the seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's Journals bear to
that of the first generation.  Sewall was one of the justices who
presided at the trial of the Salem witches; but for the part which he
took in that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possible, by
open confession of his mistake and his remorse in the presence of the
Church.  Sewall was one of the first writers against African slavery,
in his brief tract, _The Selling of Joseph_, printed at Boston in 1700.
His _Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, a mystical interpretation of
prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies with
America, is remembered only because Whittier, in his _Prophecy of
Samuel Sewall_, has paraphrased one poetic passage which shows a loving
observation of nature very rare in our colonial writers.

Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the narrower
sense--that is, of the imaginative representation of life--there was
little or none in the colonial period.  There were no novels, no plays,
no satires, and--until the example of the _Spectator_ had begun to work
on this side the water--no experiments even at the lighter forms of
essay-writing, character-sketches, and literary criticism.  There was
verse of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term
would hardly allow it to be called poetry.  Many of the early divines
of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon-writing,
of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles
distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphysical poets,"
whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner
of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New-English muse, the
_Emblems_ of Quarles and the _Divine Week_ of Du Bartas, as translated
by Sylvester.  The _Magnalia_ contains a number of these things in
Latin and English, and is itself well bolstered with complimentary
introductions in meter by the author's friends.  For example:

  COTTONIUS MATHERUS.

  ANAGRAM.

  _Tuos Tecum Ornasti_.

  "While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise
  _Thine, with thyself thou dost immortalize_.
  To view the odds thy learned lives invite
  'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite.
  But all succeeding ages shall despair
  A fitting monument for thee to _rear_.
  Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!)
  Hath given them a lasting _writ of ease_."

The epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious in the
matter of puns, anagrams, and similar conceits.  The death of the Rev.
Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of this sort not to
be missed, and his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a
"whetstone," a "loadstone," an "Ebenezer"--

  "A stone for kingly David's use so fit
  As would not fail Goliath's front to hit," etc.

The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of
colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom_ (1663), a
kind of doggerel _Inferno_, which went through nine editions, and "was
the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the
pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to
its premonitions of eternal combustion."  Wigglesworth had not the
technical equipment of a poet.  His verse is sing-song, his language
rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are
more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader.  But there are
an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his
gloomy poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for
its universal currency among a people like the Puritans.  One stanza
has been often quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants
of "the easiest room in hell"--a _limbus infantum_ which even Origen
need not have scrupled at.

The most authoritative expounder of New England Calvinism was Jonathan
Edwards (1703-58), a native of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, who
was minister for more than twenty years over the church in Northampton,
Mass., afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the time
of his death had just been inaugurated president of Princeton College.
By virtue of his _Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will_, 1754, Edwards
holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his age.  This treatise was
composed to justify, on philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic
doctrines of fore-ordination and election by grace, though its
arguments are curiously coincident with those of the scientific
necessitarians, whose conclusions are as far asunder from Edwards's "as
from the center thrice to the utmost pole."  His writings belong to
theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity and a
spiritual elevation about them, apart from the profundity and acuteness
of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer ether of
purely emotional or imaginative art.  He dwelt rather upon the terrors
than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dogmas of
predestination, original sin, total depravity, and eternal punishment.
The titles of his sermons are significant: _Men Naturally God's
Enemies_, _Wrath upon the Wicked to the Uttermost_, _The Final
Judgment_, etc.  "A natural man," he wrote in the first of these
discourses, "has a heart like the heart of a devil. . . .  The heart of
a natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold
corpse is of vital heat."  Perhaps the most famous of Edwards's sermons
was _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_, preached at Enfield, Conn.,
July 8, 1741, "at a time of great awakenings," and upon the ominous
text, _Their foot shall slide in due time_.  "The God that holds you
over the pit of hell," runs an oft-quoted passage from this powerful
denunciation of the wrath to come, "much as one holds a spider or some
loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully
provoked. . . .  You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes
than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. . . .  You hang by a
slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about
it. . . .  If you cry to God to pity you he will be so far from pitying
you in your doleful case that he will only tread you under foot. . . .
He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled
on his garments so as to stain all his raiment."  But Edwards was a
rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of the God, and
there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his _Treatise
Concerning Religious Affections_, 1746.  Such is his portrait of Sarah
Pierpont, "a young lady in New Haven," who afterward became his wife
and who "will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly,
and no one knows for what.  She loves to be alone, walking in the
fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always
conversing with her."  Edwards's printed works number thirty-six
titles.  A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in
1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight.  The memoranda from
Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a
remarkable precocity.  Even as a school-boy and a college student he
had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might
have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal
cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the
existence of matter.  In passing from Mather to Edwards we step from
the seventeenth to the eighteenth century.  There is the same
difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton
and Locke, or between Fuller and Bryden.  The learned digressions, the
witty conceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with scraps of
Latin, have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed wig and the clerical
gown and bands have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress of
the modern minister.  In Edwards's English all is simple, precise,
direct, and business-like.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), who was strictly contemporary with
Edwards, was a contrast to him in every respect.  As Edwards represents
the spirituality and other-worldliness of Puritanism, Franklin stands
for the worldly and secular side of American character, and he
illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the
modern Yankee.  Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance
or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and
utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's
sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people.  He was the
first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a
cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the
mind of Europe.  He was the embodiment of common sense and of the
useful virtues, with the enterprise but without the nervousness of his
modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness of mind to the
sagacity and quickness of resource of the self-made business man.  He
was representative also of his age, an age of _aufklaerung_,
_eclaircissement_, or "clearing up."  By the middle of the eighteenth
century a change had taken place in American society.  Trade had
increased between the different colonies; Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia were considerable towns; democratic feeling was spreading;
over forty newspapers were published in America at the outbreak of the
Revolution; politics claimed more attention than formerly, and theology
less.  With all this intercourse and mutual reaction of the various
colonies upon one another, the isolated theocracy of New England
naturally relaxed somewhat of its grip on the minds of the laity.  When
Franklin was a printer's apprentice in Boston, setting type on his
brother's _New England Courant_, the fourth American newspaper, he got
hold of an odd volume of the _Spectator_, and formed his style upon
Addison, whose manner he afterward imitated in his _Busy-Body_ papers
in the Philadelphia _Weekly Mercury_.  He also read Locke and the
English deistical writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became himself
a deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when practicing his trade in
London, in 1724-26, he made the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author
of the _Fable of the Bees_, at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, called
"The Horns," where the famous free-thinker presided over a club of wits
and boon companions.  Though a native of Boston, Franklin is identified
with Philadelphia, whither he arrived in 1723, a runaway 'prentice boy,
"whose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling
in copper."  The description in his _Autobiography_ of his walking up
Market Street munching a loaf of bread, and passing his future wife,
standing on her father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as the
anecdote about Whittington and his cat.

It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was greatest, as an
originator and executor of projects for the general welfare.  The list
of his public services is almost endless.  He organized the
Philadelphia fire department and street-cleaning service, and the
colonial postal system which grew into the United States Post Office
Department.  He started the Philadelphia public library, the American
Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania, and the first
American magazine, _The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle_; so
that he was almost singly the father of whatever intellectual life the
Pennsylvania colony could boast.  In 1754, when commissioners from the
colonies met at Albany, Franklin proposed a plan, which was adopted,
for the union of all the colonies under one government.  But all these
things, as well as his mission to England in 1757, on behalf of the
Pennsylvania Assembly in its dispute with the proprietaries; his share
in the Declaration of Independence--of which he was one of the
signers--and his residence in France as embassador of the United
Colonies, belong to the political history of the country; to the
history of American science belong his celebrated experiments in
electricity; and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments
were aptly summed up in the famous epigram of the French statesman
Turgot:

  "_Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyranniis_."

Franklin's success in Europe was such as no American had yet achieved,
as few Americans since him have achieved.  Hume and Voltaire were among
his acquaintances and his professed admirers.  In France he was fairly
idolized, and when he died Mirabeau announced, "The genius which has
freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe has returned to
the bosom of the Divinity."

Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great writer, though as a
writer, too, he had many admirable and some great qualities.  Among
these were the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style.  His more
strictly literary performances, such as his essays after the
_Spectator_, hardly rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor
worse than other imitations of Addison.  But in some of his lighter
bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness which
have won them enduring favor.  Such are his famous story of the
_Whistle_, his _Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout_, his letters to
Madame Helvetius, and his verses entitled _Paper_.  The greater portion
of his writings consists of papers on general politics, commerce, and
political economy, contributions to the public questions of his day.
These are of the nature of journalism rather than of literature, and
many of them were published in his newspaper, the _Pennsylvania
Gazette_, the medium through which for many years he most strongly
influenced American opinion.  The most popular of his writings were his
_Autobiography_ and _Poor Richard's Almanac_.  The former of these was
begun in 1771, resumed in 1788, but never completed.  It has remained
the most widely current book in our colonial literature.  _Poor
Richard's Almanac_, begun in 1732 and continued for about twenty-five
years, had an annual circulation of ten thousand copies.  It was filled
with proverbial sayings in prose and verse, inculcating the virtues of
industry, honesty, and frugality.[1]  Some of these were original with
Franklin, others were selected from the proverbial wisdom of the ages,
but a new force was given them by pungent turns of expression.  Poor
Richard's saws were such as these: "Little strokes fell great oaks;"
"Three removes are as bad as a fire;" "Early to bed and early to rise
makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise;" "Never leave that till
to-morrow which you can do to-day;" "What maintains one vice would
bring up two children;" "It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright."

Now and then there are truths of a higher kind than these in Franklin,
and Sainte-Beuve, the great French critic, quotes, as an example of his
occasional finer moods, the saying, "Truth and sincerity have a certain
distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be counterfeited;
they are like fire and flame that cannot be painted."  But the sage who
invented the Franklin stove had no disdain of small utilities; and in
general the last word of his philosophy is well expressed in a passage
of his _Autobiography_: "Human felicity is produced not so much by
great pieces of good fortune, that seldom happen, as by little
advantages that occur every day; thus, if you teach a poor young man to
shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to
the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas."


1. Captain John Smith.  _A True Relation of Virginia_, Deane's edition.
Boston: 1866.

2. Cotton Mather.  _Magnalia Christi Americana_.  Hartford: 1820.

3. Samuel Sewall.  _Diary_.  Massachusetts Historical Collections.
Fifth Series.  Vols. v, vi, and vii.  Boston: 1878.

4. Jonathan Edwards.  _Eight Sermons on Various Occasions_.  Vol. vii
of Edwards's Works.  Edited by Sereno Dwight.  New York: 1829.

5. Benjamin Franklin.  _Autobiography_.  Edited by John Bigelow.
Philadelphia: 1869.  [J. B. Lippincott & Co.]

6. _Essays and Bagatelles_.  Vol. ii of Franklin's Works.  Edited by
Jared Sparks.  Boston: 1836.

7. Moses Coit Tyler.  _A History of American Literature_.  1607-1765.
New York: 1878.  [G. P. Putnam's Sons.]


[1]_The Way to Wealth, Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds,
Rules of Health, Advice to a Young Tradesman, The Way to Make Money
Plenty in Every Man's Pocket_, etc.


[Transcriber's Note: The word "Ogge" was transliterated from the Greek
characters Omicron, gamma, gamma, eta.]




CHAPTER II.


THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

1765-1815.

It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between
the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine
colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second
war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period.
This half-century was the formative era of the American nation.
Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the
years of construction.  But the men who led the movement for
independence were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping
the Constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of
the whole period is one and the same.  The character of the age was as
distinctly political as that of the colonial era--in New England at
least--was theological; and literature must still continue to borrow
its interest from history.  Pure literature, or what, for want of a
better term, we call _belles lettres_, was not born in America until
the nineteenth century was well under way.  It is true that the
Revolution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these
were strictly for the home market.  They hardly penetrated the
consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the
contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and
Burke.  Their importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than
literary, though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due
course in the present chapter.  It is also true that one or two of
Irving's early books fall within the last years of the period now under
consideration.  But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges,
and these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter.

Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that
preceded and accompanied the Revolutionary movement were the speeches
of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy,
in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia.  Oratory is the art of
a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome and
in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and
congresses of Revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished
naturally.  The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a
rhetorical, age; and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the
declamatory _Letters of Junius_, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox,
Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early
Congresses.  The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is
largely traditionary.  The spoken word transferred to the printed page
loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment.  A speech is
good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is
sought.  But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional,
rather than universal and permanent, explains why so few speeches are
really literature.  If this is true, even where the words of an orator
are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we
have only the testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the
oration produced.  The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were
either not reported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that
posterity can judge of them only at second-hand.  Patrick Henry has
fared better, many of his orations being preserved in substance, if not
in the letter, in Wirt's biography.  Of these the most famous was the
defiant speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 28, 1775, throwing
down the gauge of battle to the British ministry.  The ringing
sentences of this challenge are still declaimed by school-boys, and
many of them remain as familiar as household words.  "I have but one
lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.
I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. . . .
Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. . . .  Is life
so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains
and slavery?  Forbid it, Almighty God!  I know not what course others
may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"  The
eloquence of Patrick Henry was fervid rather than weighty or rich.  But
if such specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as have come
down to us fail to account for the wonderful impression that their
words are said to have produced upon their fellow-countrymen, we should
remember that they are at a disadvantage when read instead of heard.
The imagination should supply all those accessories which gave them
vitality when first pronounced--the living presence and voice of the
speaker; the listening Senate; the grave excitement of the hour and of
the impending conflict.  The wordiness and exaggeration; the highly
Latinized diction; the rhapsodies about freedom which hundreds of
Fourth-of-July addresses have since turned into platitudes--all these
coming hot from the lips of men whose actions in the field confirmed
the earnestness of their speech--were effective in the crisis and for
the purpose to which they were addressed.

The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less potent than the
platform, and patriots such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Hancock
wrote constantly, for the newspapers, essays and letters on the public
questions of the time signed "Vindex," "Hyperion," "Independent,"
"Brutus," "Cassius," and the like, and couched in language which to the
taste of to-day seems rather over-rhetorical.  Among the most important
of these political essays were the _Circular Letter to each Colonial
Legislature_, published by Adams and Otis in 1768; Quincy's
_Observations on the Boston Port Bill_, 1774, and Otis's _Rights of the
British Colonies_, a pamphlet of one hundred and twenty pages, printed
in 1764.  No collection of Otis's writings has ever been made.  The
life of Quincy, published by his son, preserves for posterity his
journals and correspondence, his newspaper essays, and his speeches at
the bar, taken from the Massachusetts law reports.

Among the political literature which is of perennial interest to the
American people are such State documents as the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the messages,
inaugural addresses, and other writings of our early presidents.
Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, and the
father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of
Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the
memory of all readers.  One sentence in particular has been as a
shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all
shades of opinion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all
men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness."  Not so familiar to modern readers is the
following, which an English historian of our literature calls "the most
eloquent clause of that great document," and "the most interesting
suppressed passage in American literature."  Jefferson was a
Southerner, but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on
the subject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George for
promoting the "peculiar institution" was left out from the final draft
of the Declaration in deference to Southern members.

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most
sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people
who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in
another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation
thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is
the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain.  Determined to keep
open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted
his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this
execrable commerce.  And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no
fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise
in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them
by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off
former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes
which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other Southern
statesman afterward adopted on the subject of slavery was not taken by
the men of Jefferson's generation.  Another famous Virginian, John
Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slave-holder, in his speech on the
militia bill in the House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said:
"I speak from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls for fire
in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her
bosom."  This was said _apropos_ of the danger of a servile
insurrection in the event of a war with England--a war which actually
broke out in the year following, but was not attended with the
slave-rising which Randolph predicted.  Randolph was a thorough-going
"State rights" man, and, though opposed to slavery on principle, he
cried "Hands off!" to any interference by the general government with
the domestic institutions of the States.  His speeches read better than
most of his contemporaries'.  They are interesting in their exhibit of
a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in
a pungent and familiar style which contrasts refreshingly with the
diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional
oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its subject always at
arm's-length.

Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was his Inaugural Address of
March 4, 1801, with its programme of "equal and exact justice to all
men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace,
commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances
with none; the support of the State governments in all their
rights; . . . absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the
majority; . . . the supremacy of the civil over the military authority;
economy in the public expense; freedom of religion, freedom of the
press, and freedom of person under the protection of the _habeas
corpus_, and trial by juries impartially selected."

During his six years' residence in France, as American minister,
Jefferson had become indoctrinated with the principles of French
democracy.  His main service and that of his party--the Democratic, or,
as it was then called, the Republican party--to the young republic was
in its insistence upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom
of the individual from all forms of governmental restraint.  Jefferson
has some claims to rank as an author in general literature.  Educated
at William and Mary College in the old Virginia capital, Williamsburg,
he became the founder of the University of Virginia, in which he made
special provision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which the
liberal scheme of instruction and discipline was conformed, in theory,
at least, to the "university idea."  His _Notes on Virginia_ are not
without literary quality, and one description, in particular, has been
often quoted--the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge--in
which is this poetically imaginative touch: "The mountain being cloven
asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of
smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country,
inviting you, as it were, from the riot and ytumult roaring around, to
pass through the breach and participate of the calm below."

After the conclusion of peace with England, in 1783, political
discussion centered about the Constitution, which in 1788 took the
place of the looser Articles of Confederation adopted in 1778.  The
Constitution as finally ratified was a compromise between two
parties--the Federalists, who wanted a strong central government, and
the Anti-Federals (afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), who
wished to preserve State sovereignty.  The debates on the adoption of
the Constitution, both in the General Convention of the States, which
met at Philadelphia in 1787, and in the separate State conventions
called to ratify its action, form a valuable body of comment and
illustration upon the instrument itself.  One of the most notable of
the speeches in opposition was Patrick Henry's address before the
Virginia Convention.  "That this is a consolidated government," he
said, "is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is,
to my mind, very striking."  The leader of the Federal party was
Alexander Hamilton, the ablest constructive intellect among the
statesmen of our Revolutionary era, of whom Talleyrand said that he
"had never known his equal," whom Guizot classed with "the men who have
best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a
government worthy of its name and mission."  Hamilton's speech _On the
Expediency of Adopting the Federal Constitution_, delivered in the
Convention of New York, June 24, 1788, was a masterly statement of the
necessity and advantages of the Union.  But the most complete
exposition of the constitutional philosophy of the Federal party was
the series of eighty-five papers entitled the _Federalist_, printed
during the years 1787-88, and mostly in the _Independent Journal_ of
New York, over the signature "Publius."  These were the work of
Hamilton, of John Jay, afterward, chief-justice, and of James Madison,
afterward president of the United States.  The _Federalist_ papers,
though written in a somewhat ponderous diction, are among the great
landmarks of American history, and were in themselves a political
education to the generation that read them.  Hamilton was a brilliant
and versatile figure, a persuasive orator, a forcible writer, and as
secretary of the treasury under Washington the foremost of American
financiers.  He was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr, at Weehawken, in
1804.

The Federalists were victorious, and under the provisions of the new
Constitution George Washington was inaugurated first President of the
United States, on March 4, 1789.  Washington's writings have been
collected by Jared Sparks.  They consist of journals, letters,
messages, addresses, and public documents, for the most part plain and
business-like in manner, and without any literary pretensions.  The
most elaborate and the best known of them is his _Farewell Address_,
issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796.  In the
composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay.  It
is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in
expression.  The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the
United States, and his _Diary_, kept from 1755-85, should also be
mentioned as important sources for a full knowledge of this period.

In the long life-and-death struggle of Great Britain against the French
Republic and its successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in
this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian
Democracy with France.  The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping
abstractions of the French Revolution and clung to the conservative
notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English
precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings.  On
their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French
atheism and French Jacobinism.  By a singular reversal of the natural
order of things, the strength of the Federalist party was in New
England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the
Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure--owing to the
system of slavery--was intensely aristocratic.  The War of 1812 with
England was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury which
it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Convention
of 1814 was more than suspected of a design to bring about the
secession of New England from the Union.  A good deal of oratory was
called out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great Britain
negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition Law of 1798, and
by other pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the downfall of
that party and the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800.
The best of the Federalist orators during those years was Fisher Ames,
of Massachusetts, and the best of his orations was, perhaps, his speech
on the British treaty in the House of Representatives, April 18, 1796.
The speech was, in great measure, a protest against American chauvinism
and the violation of international obligations.  "It has been said the
world ought to rejoice if Britain was sunk in the sea; if where there
are now men and wealth and laws and liberty there was no more than a
sand-bank for sea-monsters to fatten on; space for the storms of the
ocean to mingle in conflict. . . .  What is patriotism?  Is it a narrow
affection for the spot where a man was born?  Are the very clods where
we tread entitled to this ardent preference because they are
greener? . . .  I see no exception to the respect that is paid among
nations to the law of good faith. . . .  It is observed by
barbarians--a whiff of tobacco-smoke or a string of beads gives not
merely binding force but sanctity to treaties.  Even in Algiers a truce
may be bought for money, but, when ratified, even Algiers is too wise
or too just to disown and annul its obligation."  Ames was a scholar,
and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful, more _literary_, in
a way, than those of his contemporaries.  His eulogiums on Washington
and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather excessive, perhaps, in
laudation and in classical allusions.  In all the oratory of the
Revolutionary period there is nothing equal in deep and condensed
energy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,
"that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain."

A prominent figure during and after the War of the Revolution was
Thomas Paine, or, as he was somewhat disrespectfully called, "Tom
Paine."  He was a dissenting minister who, conceiving himself
ill-treated by the British government, came to Philadelphia in 1774 and
threw himself heart and soul into the colonial cause.  His pamphlet,
_Common Sense_, issued in 1776, began with the famous words, "These are
the times that try men's souls."  This was followed by the _Crisis_, a
series of political essays advocating independence and the
establishment of a republic, published in periodical form, though at
irregular intervals.  Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy was of great
service to the American patriots.  His writings were popular and his
arguments were of a kind easily understood by plain people, addressing
themselves to the common sense, the prejudices and passions of
unlettered readers.  He afterward went to France and took an active
part in the popular movement there, crossing swords with Burke in his
_Rights of Man_, 1791-92, written in defense of the French Revolution.
He was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Convention; but falling
under suspicion during the days of the Terror, he was committed to the
prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robespierre
July 27, 1794.  While in prison he wrote a portion of his best-known
work, the _Age of Reason_.  This appeared in two parts in 1794 and
1795, the manuscript of the first part having been intrusted to Joel
Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when Paine was
sent to prison.

The _Age of Reason_ damaged Paine's reputation in America, where the
name of "Tom Paine" became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and a
synonym for atheism and blasphemy.  His book was denounced from a
hundred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away from the
sight of "the young," whose religious beliefs it might undermine.  It
was, in effect, a crude and popular statement of the deistic argument
against Christianity.  What the cutting logic and persiflage--the
_sourire hideux_--of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser
materials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations.  Deism
was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel
Barlow, and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly
deistic.  Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic opinions,
and was a part of the liberal movement of the age.  Paine was a man
without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling.  He was no
scholar, and he was not troubled by any perception of the deeper and
subtler aspects of the questions which he touched.  In his examination
of the Old and New Testaments he insisted that the Bible was an
imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities.
Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and miracles, was a
fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and churches were
instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants.  This way of
accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even the most
"advanced" thinkers.  The contest between skepticism and revelation has
long since shifted to other grounds.  Both the philosophy and the
temper of the _Age of Reason_ belong to the eighteenth century.  But
Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with
shrewd, half-educated doubters; and in America well-thumbed copies of
his book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store,
where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the
schoolmaster.  Paine rested his argument against Christianity upon the
familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, the falsity of
prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses and David and other Old
Testament worthies, the disagreement of the evangelists in their
gospels, etc.  The spirit of his book and his competence as a critic
are illustrated by his saying of the New Testament: "Any person who
could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man's walking, could have
made such books, for the story is most wretchedly told.  The sum total
of a parson's learning is _a-b_, _ab_, and _hic_, _hoec_, _hoc_, and
this is more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at
the time, to have written all the books of the New Testament."

When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the
Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that
would deserve mention in a more crowded period.  The few things in this
kind that have kept afloat on the current of time--_rari nantes in
gurgite vasto_--attract attention rather by reason of their fewness
than of any special excellence that they have.  During the eighteenth
century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes
of taste in the old country.  The so-called classical or Augustan
writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style; the
_Spectator_ set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from
Franklin's _Busybody_ down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated the
Addisonian tradition later than any English writer.  The influence of
Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the parliamentary orators has already
been mentioned.  In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we
find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New
Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem
on _Philosophic Solitude_ which reproduces the tricks of Pope's
antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the _Rape of the Lock_, and
the didactic morality of the _Imitations from Horace_ and the _Moral
Essays_:

  "Let ardent heroes seek renown to arms,
  Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms;
  To shining palaces let fools resort,
  And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court.
  Mine be the pleasure of a rural life,
  From noise remote and ignorant of strife,
  Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau,
  The lawless masquerade and midnight show;
  From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars,
  Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars."

The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's
_McFingal_, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and incomplete
shape at Hartford in 1782.  It went through more than thirty editions
in America, and was several times reprinted in England.  _McFingal_ was
a satire in four cantos, directed against the American loyalists, and
modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, _Hudibras_.  As
Butler's hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so
the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bonfires of
the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill-entreated,
and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston.  The
poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery
and sometimes to genuine humor.  It remains one of the best of American
political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many
imitations of _Hudibras_, whose manner it follows so closely that some
of its lines, which have passed into currency as proverbs, are
generally attributed to Butler.  For example:

  "No man e'er felt the halter draw
  With good opinion of the law."

Or this:

  "For any man with half an eye
  What stands before him may espy;
  But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
  To see what is not to be seen."

Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own
countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the
newly adopted flag of the Confederation:

  "Inscribed with inconsistent types
  Of Liberty and thirteen stripes."

Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made such
noise in their time as the "Hartford Wits."  The other members of the
group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith,
Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop.  Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow
had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale,
where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight.
During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at
its close they found themselves again together for a few years at
Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and
literary purposes.  Their presence lent a sort of _eclat_ to the little
provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an
intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New
York.  The Hartford Wits were stanch Federalists, and used their pens
freely in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and
in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats.  In 1786-87 Trumbull,
Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the _New Haven Gazette_ a
series of satirical papers entitled the _Anarchiad_, suggested by the
English _Rolliad_, and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic
on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night."  The papers were
an effort to correct, by ridicule, the anarchic condition of things
which preceded the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789.  It
was a time of great confusion and discontent, when, in parts of the
country, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five
years' pay by the Continental Congress to the officers of the American
army.  The _Anarchiad_ was followed by the _Echo_ and the _Political
Green House_, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar
in character and tendency to the earlier series.  Time has greatly
blunted the edge of these satires, but they were influential in their
day, and are an important part of the literature of the old Federalist
party.

Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplomatic service, and
was, successively, embassador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he
introduced into America the breed of merino sheep.  He had been on
Washington's staff during the war, and was several times an inmate of
his house at Mount Vernon, where he produced, in 1785, the best-known
of his writings, _Mount Vernon_, an ode of a rather mild description,
which once had admirers.  Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in
contemporary letters.  After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to
France, where he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in
speculations, and became imbued with French principles, writing a song
in praise of the guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old
friends at home.  In 1805 he returned to America and built a fine
residence near Washington, which he called Kalorama.  Barlow's literary
fame, in his own generation, rested upon his prodigious epic, the
_Columbiad_.  The first form of this was the _Vision of Columbus_,
published at Hartford in 1787.  This he afterward recast and enlarged
into the _Columbiad_, issued in Philadelphia in 1807, and dedicated to
Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steam-boat.  This was by far the
most sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been published in
America, and was embellished with plates executed by the best London
engravers.

The _Columbiad_ was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of
much ridicule by later writers.  Hawthorne suggested its being
dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder
and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in the last
fifty years had read more than a hundred lines of it."  In its
ambitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the spirit of the
age which was patriotically determined to create, by _tour de force_, a
national literature of a size commensurate with the scale of American
nature and the destinies of the republic.  As America was bigger than
Argos and Troy we ought to have a bigger epic than the _Iliad_.
Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a
"hill of vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the
history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call it,
Columbia.  He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and
fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru; the settlements of the
English colonies in North America; the old French and Indian wars; the
Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the
new-born nation.  The machinery of the _Vision_ was borrowed from the
11th and 12th books of _Paradise Lost_.  Barlow's verse was the
ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his poetic style was
distinguished by the vague, glittering imagery and the false sublimity
which marked the epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets.  Though Barlow
was but a masquerader in true heroic he showed himself a true poet in
mock heroic.  His _Hasty Pudding_, written in Savoy in 1793, and
dedicated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly American, in subject at
least, and its humor, though over-elaborate, is good.  One couplet in
particular has prevailed against oblivion:

  "E'en in thy native regions how I blush
  To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee _Mush_!"

Another Connecticut poet--one of the seven who were fondly named "The
Pleiads of Connecticut"--was Timothy Dwight, whose _Conquest of
Canaan_, written shortly after his graduation from college, but not
published till 1785, was, like the _Columbiad_, an experiment toward
the domestication of the epic muse in America.  It was written like
Barlow's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic impulse of the
time shows oddly in the introduction of our Revolutionary War, by way
of episode, among the wars of Israel.  _Greenfield Hill_, 1794, was an
idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of a rural parish in
Connecticut of which the author was for a time the pastor.  It is not
quite without merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thomson,
and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious and tame.  Byron was amused that
there should have been an American poet christened Timothy, and it is
to be feared that amusement would have been the chief emotion kindled
in the breast of the wicked Voltaire had he ever chanced to see the
stern dedication to himself of the same poet's _Triumph of Infidelity_,
1788.  Much more important than Dwight's poetry was his able _Theology
Explained and Defended_, 1794, a restatement, with modifications, of
the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards, which was accepted by the
Congregational churches of New England as an authoritative exponent of
the orthodoxy of the time.  His _Travels in New England and New York_,
including descriptions of Niagara, the White Mountains, Lake George,
the Catskills, and other passages of natural scenery, not so familiar
then as now, was published posthumously in 1821, was praised by
Southey, and is still readable.  As President of Yale College from 1795
to 1817 Dwight, by his learning and ability, his sympathy with young
men, and the force and dignity of his character, exerted a great
influence in the community.

The strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex most of the
miscellaneous literature that was produced.  A number of ballads,
serious and comic, whig and tory, dealing with the battles and other
incidents of the long war, enjoyed a wide circulation in the newspapers
or were hawked about in printed broadsides.  Most of these have no
literary merit, and are now mere antiquarian curiosities.  A favorite
piece on the tory side was the _Cow Chase_, a cleverish parody on
_Chevy Chase_, written by the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre, at
the expense of "Mad" Anthony Wayne.  The national song _Yankee Doodle_
was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the case with _John
Brown's Body_ and many other popular melodies, some obscurity hangs
about its origin.  The air was an old one, and the words of the chorus
seem to have been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song, and applied
in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of the British army as
early as 1755.  Like many another nickname, the term Yankee Doodle was
taken up by the nicknamed and proudly made their own.  The stanza,

  "Yankee Doodle came to town," etc.,

antedates the war; but the first complete set of words to the tune was
the _Yankee's Return from Camp_, which is apparently of the year 1775.
The most popular humorous ballad on the whig side was the _Battle of
the Kegs_, founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at
Philadelphia.  This was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphian,
and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  Hopkinson
has some title to rank as one of the earliest American humorists.
Without the keen wit of _McFingal_, some of his _Miscellaneous Essays
and Occasional Writings_, published in 1792, have more geniality and
heartiness than Trumbull's satire.  His _Letter on Whitewashing_ is a
bit of domestic humor that foretokens the _Danbury News_ man; and his
_Modern Learning_, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in which
a salt-box is described from the point of view of metaphysics, logic,
natural philosophy, mathematics, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry, long
kept its place in school-readers and other collections.  His son,
Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song of _Hail Columbia_, which is saved
from insignificance only by the music to which it was married, the then
popular air of "The President's March."  The words were written in
1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at a time when
party spirit ran high.  It was sung nightly by crowds in the streets,
and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater; for by this
time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and even in
puritanic Boston.  Much better than _Hail Columbia_ was the
_Star-Spangled Banner_, the words of which were composed by Francis
Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort
McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812.  More pretentious than these was the
once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., _Adams and Liberty_,
recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society.
The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it
is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance.  Paine was a young
Harvard graduate, who had married an actress playing at the Old Federal
Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Boston, in 1794.  His
name was originally Thomas, but this was changed for him by the
Massachusetts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded
with the author of the _Age of Reason_.  "Dim are those names erstwhile
in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for
liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or remembered only
by some phrase which has become a current quotation.  Here and there a
line has, by accident, survived to do duty as a motto or inscription,
while all its context is buried in oblivion.  Few have read any thing
more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than the couplet,

  "No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
  But the whole boundless continent is yours,"

taken from his _Epilogue to Cato_, written in 1778.

Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau--"that rascal Freneau,"
as Washington called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon his
administration in Freneau's _National Gazette_.  He was of Huguenot
descent, was a class-mate of Madison at Princeton College, was taken
prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over
engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the
Democrats.  Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now
unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by
virtue of his _Wild Honeysuckle_, _Indian Burying Ground_, _Indian
Student_, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and
delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood,

Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" hitherto mentioned were
nothing but rhymers; but in Freneau we meet with something of beauty
and artistic feeling; something which still keeps his verses fresh.  In
his treatment of Indian themes, in particular, appear for the first
time a sense of the picturesque and poetic elements in the character
and wild life of the red man, and that pensive sentiment which the
fading away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in the wake of
their retreating footsteps.  In this Freneau anticipates Cooper and
Longfellow, though his work is slight compared with the
_Leatherstocking Tales_ or _Hiawatha_.  At the time when the
Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over
three millions; Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and the
frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board.  The
Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau
fetches his _Indian Student_ not from the outskirts of the settlement
but from the remote backwoods of the State:

  "From Susquehanna's farthest springs,
    Where savage tribes pursue their game
  (His blanket tied with yellow strings),
    A shepherd of the forest came."

Campbell "lifted"--in his poem _O'Conor's Child_--the last line of the
following stanza from Freneau's _Indian Burying Ground_:

  "By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
    In vestments for the chase arrayed,
  The hunter still the deer pursues--
    The hunter and the deer, a shade."

And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in _Marmion_, the
final line of one of the stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw
Springs:

  "They saw their injured country's woe,
    The flaming town, the wasted field;
  Then rushed to meet the insulting foe,
    They took the spear, but left the shield."

Scott inquired of an American gentleman who visited him the authorship
of this poem, which he had by heart, and pronounced it as fine a thing
of the kind as there was in the language.

The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginning
during the period now under review.  A company of English players came
to this country in 1762 and made the tour of many of the principal
towns.  The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage
was the _Merchant of Venice_, which was given by the English company at
Williamsburg, Va., in 1752.  The first regular theater building was at
Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe performed, among
other pieces, Farquhar's _Beaux' Stratagem_.  In 1753 a theater was
built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia.  The Quakers of
Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the
acting of plays, and in the latter city the players were several times
arrested during the performances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding
dramatic performances.  At Newport, R.I., on the other hand, which was
a health resort for planters from the Southern States and the West
Indies, and the largest slave-market in the North, the actors were
hospitably received.  The first play known to have been written by an
American was the _Prince of Parthia_, 1765, a closet drama, by Thomas
Godfrey, of Philadelphia.  The first play by an American writer, acted
by professionals in a public theater, was Royall Tyler's _Contrast_,
performed in New York, in 1786.  The former of these was very high
tragedy, and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them is
otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of
indifferent dramas.  There is, in fact, no American dramatic literature
worth speaking of; not a single American play of even the second rank,
unless we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell's
_Elevator_ and _Sleeping-Car_.  Royall Tyler, the author of _The
Contrast_, cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and
eventually became chief-justice of Vermont.  His comedy, _The Georgia
Spec_, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his _Algerine Captive_,
published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels.
It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan
of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war
between the United States and Algiers in 1815.

Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of any note, was
also the first professional man of letters in this country who
supported himself entirely by his pen.  He was born in Philadelphia in
1771, lived a part of his life in New York and part in his native city,
where he started, in 1803, the _Literary Magazine and American
Register_.  During the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid succession
six romances, _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, _Edgar Huntley_,
_Clara Howard_, and _Jane Talbot_.  Brown was an invalid and something
of a recluse, with a relish for the ghastly in incident and the morbid
in character.  He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and Hawthorne,
though his art was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost infinitely so
to Hawthorne's.  His books belong more properly to the contemporary
school of fiction in England which preceded the "Waverley Novels"--to
the class that includes Beckford's _Vathek_, Godwin's _Caleb Williams_
and _St. Leon_, Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_, and such "Gothic"
romances as Lewis's _Monk_, Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, and Mrs.
Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_.  A distinguishing characteristic of
this whole school is what we may call the clumsy-horrible.  Brown's
romances are not wanting in inventive power, in occasional situations
that are intensely thrilling, and in subtle analysis of character; but
they are fatally defective in art.  The narrative is by turns abrupt
and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not so much by dialogue as by
elaborate dissection and discussion of motives and states of mind,
interspersed with the author's reflections.  The wild improbabilities
of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous developments of character
are in startling contrast with the old-fashioned preciseness of the
language; the conversations, when there are any, being conducted in
that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an "elegant
female." The following is a sample description of one of Brown's
heroines, and is taken from his novel of _Ormond_, the leading
character in which--a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish
wickedness--is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr: "Helena
Cleves was endowed with every feminine and fascinating quality.  Her
features were modified by the most transient sentiments and were the
seat of a softness at all times blushful and bewitching.  All those
graces of symmetry, smoothness, and luster, which assemble in the
imagination of the painter when he calls from the bosom of her natal
deep the Paphian divinity, blended their perfections in the shade,
complexion, and hair of this lady."  But, alas!  "Helena's intellectual
deficiencies could not be concealed.  She was proficient in the
elements of no science.  The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as
disproportionate with her intellects as with those of the mock-bird.
She had not reasoned on the principles of human action, nor examined
the structure of society. . . .  She could not commune in their native
dialect with the sages of Rome and Athens. . . .  The constitution of
nature, the attributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts of
the external universe, and the substance, modes of operation, and
ultimate destiny of human intelligence were enigmas unsolved and
insoluble by her."

Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis
ludicrously weak.  Thus the hero of his first novel, _Wieland_ (whose
father anticipates "Old Krook," in Dickens's _Bleak House_, by dying of
spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual
voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be
produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story.
Similarly in Edgar Huntley, the plot turns upon the phenomena of
sleep-walking.  Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his
romances in his own country, and the only passages in them which have
now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in
_Edgar Huntley_, and his graphic account in _Arthur Mervyn_ of the
yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793.  Shelley was an admirer
of Brown, and his experiments in prose fiction, such as _Zastrozzi_ and
_St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian_, are of the same abnormal and speculative
type.

Another book which falls within this period was the _Journal_, 1774, of
John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, which has received the highest
praise from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others.  "Get the writings
of John Woolman by heart," wrote Lamb, "and love the early Quakers."
The charm of this journal resides in its singular sweetness and
innocence of feeling, the "deep inward stillness" peculiar to the
people called Quakers.  Apart from his constant use of certain phrases
peculiar to the Friends Woolman's English is also remarkably graceful
and pure, the transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere, and
tender and humble in its sincerity.  When not working at his trade as a
tailor Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering to the
monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on
horseback to their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia
and North Carolina, and northward along the coast as far as Boston and
Nantucket.  He was under a "concern" and a "heavy exercise" touching
the keeping of slaves, and by his writing and speaking did much to
influence the Quakers against slavery.  His love went out, indeed, to
all the wretched and oppressed; to sailors, and to the Indians in
particular.  One of his most perilous journeys was made to the
settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of western
Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna.
Some of the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint _naivete_ with
which he expresses them, may make the modern reader smile, but it is a
smile which is very close to a tear.  Thus, when in England--where he
died in 1772--he would not ride nor send a letter by mail-coach,
because the poor post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter
nights, and were sometimes frozen to death.  "So great is the hurry in
the spirit of this world that, in aiming to do business quickly and to
gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan."  Again,
having reflected that war was caused by luxury in dress, etc., the use
of dyed garments grew uneasy to him, and he got and wore a hat of the
natural color of the fur.  "In attending meetings this singularity was
a trial to me, . . . and some Friends, who knew not from what motives I
wore it, grew shy of me. . . .  Those who spoke with me I generally
informed, in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my
own will."



1. _Representative American Orations_.  Edited by Alexander Johnston.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.  1884.

2. _The Federalist_.  New York: Charles Scribner.  1863.

3. _Notes on Virginia_.  By Thomas Jefferson.  Boston.  1829.

4. _Travels in New England and New York_.  By Timothy Dwight.  New
Haven.  1821.

5. _McFingal_: in Trumbull's Poetical Works.  Hartford.  1820.

6. Joel Barlow's _Hasty Pudding_.  Francis Hopkinson's _Modern
Learning_.  Philip Freneau's _Indian Student_, _Indian Burying-Ground_,
and _White Honeysuckle_: in Vol. I of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia of
American Literature_.  New York: Charles Scribner.  1866.

7. _Arthur Mervyn_.  By Charles Brockden Brown.  Boston: S. G.
Goodrich.  1827.

8. _The Journal of John Woolman_.  With an Introduction by John G.
Whittier.  Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.  1871.

9. _American Literature_.   By Charles F. Richardson.  New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons.  1887.

10. _American Literature_.  By John Nichol.  Edinburgh: Adam & Charles
Black.  1882.




CHAPTER III.

THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION.

1815-1837.

The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological order must here be
abandoned.  About all the American literature in existence that is of
any value as _literature_ is the product of the past three quarters of
a century, and the men who produced it, though older or younger, were
still contemporaries.  Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_,
1809, was published within the recollection of some yet living, and the
venerable poet Richard H. Dana--Irving's junior by only four
years--survived to 1879, when the youngest of the generation of writers
that now occupy public attention had already won their spurs.  Bryant,
whose _Thanatopsis_ was printed in 1816, lived down to 1878.  He saw
the beginnings of our national literature, and he saw almost as much of
the latest phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1891.  Still, even
within the limits of a single life-time, there have been progress and
change.  And so, while it will happen that the consideration of
writers, a part of whose work falls between the dates at the head of
this chapter, may be postponed to subsequent chapters, we may in a
general way follow the sequence of time.

The period between the close of the second war with England, in 1815,
and the great financial crash of 1837, has been called, in language
attributed to President Monroe, "the era of good feeling."  It was a
time of peace and prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid
extension of territory.  The new nation was entering upon its vast
estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny.  The peace with
Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian Indians and the other tribes
in alliance with England, had opened up the North-west to settlement.
Ohio had been admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President
Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand inhabitants,
and half of the State was unsettled.  The Ohio River flowed for most of
its course through an unbroken wilderness.  Chicago was merely a fort.
Hitherto the emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on
the dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus.  This
movement was stimulated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 and
the late spring of 1817, which produced a scarcity of food that
amounted in parts of the interior to a veritable famine.  All through
this period sounded the ax of the pioneer clearing the forest about his
log-cabin, and the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant-wagon over the
primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies or followed the valley
of the Mohawk.  S. G. Goodrich, known in letters as "Peter Parley," in
his _Recollections of a Life-time_, 1856, describes the part of the
movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County,
Connecticut: "I remember very well the tide of emigration through
Connecticut, on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817.  Some
persons went in covered wagons--frequently a family consisting of
father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast--some
on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettles,
gridirons, feather-beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms
and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling-book--the lares and penates of the
household.  Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of
ten miles a day. . . .  Many of these persons were in a state of
poverty, and begged their way as they went.  Some died before they
reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival from
fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was
then certain to attack the new settlers.  It was, I think, in 1818 that
I published a small tract entitled, _'Tother Side of Ohio_--that is,
the other view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the
paradise of the world.  It was written by Dr. Hand--a talented young
physician of Berlin--who had made a visit to the West about these days.
It consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and
incidents attending this wholesale migration.  The roads over the
Alleghanies, between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude, steep,
and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were
consequently strewn with the carcasses of wagons, carts, horses, oxen,
which had made shipwreck in their perilous descents."

But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life the spirit of that
time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a light-hearted
one.

  "Westward the course of empire takes its way,"

runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America.  The New
Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve went there to better
themselves; and their children found themselves the owners of broad
acres of virgin soil in place of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire
and Litchfield.  There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free
life of the frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts.  The
life of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky--that "dark and bloody
ground"--is a genuine romance.  Hardly less picturesque was the old
river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the coming of steam banished
their queer craft from the water.  Between 1810 and 1840 the center of
population in the United States had moved from the Potomac to the
neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population itself
had increased from seven to seventeen millions.  The gain was made
partly in the East and South, but the general drift was westward.
During the years now under review the following new States were
admitted, in the order named: Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama,
Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan.  Kentucky and Tennessee had been
made States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and
Louisiana--acquired by purchase from France--in 1812.

The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of wilderness
behind them.  They took up first the rich bottomlands along the river
courses, the Ohio and Miami and Licking, and later the valleys of the
Mississippi and Missouri and the shores of the great lakes.  But there
still remained backwoods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the
cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a population of more than
one hundred thousand in 1815.  When the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825,
it ran through a primitive forest.  N. P. Willis, who went by canal to
Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at
Rochester as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first
settlers.  In the same year that saw the opening of this great
water-way, the Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and
thirty thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi.  Their power
had been broken by General Hamson's victory over Tecumseh at the battle
of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and
fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of civilization
and disputed the advance of the white man for two centuries.  It was
not until some years later than this that railroads began to take an
important share in opening up new country.

The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine anticipation
which characterized American thought at this time, the picturesque
contrasts to be seen in each mushroom town where civilization was
encroaching on the raw edge of the wilderness--all these found
expression, not only in such well-known books as Cooper's _Pioneers_,
1823, and Irving's _Tour on the Prairies_, 1835, but in the minor
literature which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but
for the light that it throws on the history of national development: in
such books as Paulding's story of _Westward-Ho!_ and his poem, _The
Backwoodsman_, 1818; or as Timothy Flint's _Recollections_, 1826, and
his _Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley_, 1827.  It was
not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and
expanding prospects.  The new consciousness of empire uttered itself
hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, "spread-eagleism," and other noisy
forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly democratic and
American.  Though literature--or at least the best literature of the
time--was not yet emancipated from English models, thought and life, at
any rate, were no longer in bondage--no longer provincial.  And it is
significant that the party in office during these years was the
Democratic, the party which had broken most completely with
conservative traditions.  The famous "Monroe doctrine" was a
pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and though the Federalists
returned to power for a single term, under John Quincy Adams (1825-29),
Andrew Jackson received the largest number of electoral votes, and
Adams was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the absence of
a majority vote for any one candidate.  At the close of his term "Old
Hickory," the hero of the people, the most characteristically
democratic of our presidents, and the first backwoodsman who entered
the White House, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm.
We have now arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher
and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an existence.  S.
G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in
1818, says, in his _Recollections_: "About this time I began to think
of trying to bring out original American works. . . .  The general
impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature.  It
was the precise point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter
taunt in the _Edinburgh Review_, 'Who reads an American book?' . . .
It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to
undertake American works."  Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first
American author whose books, as _books_, obtained recognition abroad;
whose name was thought worthy of mention beside the names of English
contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge.  He was also
the first American writer whose writings are still read for their own
sake.  We read Mather's _Magnalia_, and Franklin's _Autobiography_, and
Trumbull's _McFingal_--if we read them at all--as history, and to learn
about the times or the men.  But we read the _Sketch Book_, and
_Knickerbocker's History of New York_, and the _Conquest of Granada_
for themselves and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of
literary art.

We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more cosmopolitan
standard to the works of American writers, and may disregard many a
minor author whose productions would have cut some figure had they come
to light amid the poverty of our colonial age.  Hundreds of these
forgotten names, with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned
to a limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_ and
of Griswold's _Poets of America_ and _Prose Writers of America_.  We
may select here for special mention, and as most representative of the
thought of their time, the names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and
Channing.

A generation was now coming upon the stage who could recall no other
government in this country than the government of the United States,
and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a tradition.  Born in the
very year of the peace, it was a part of Irving's mission, by the
sympathetic charm of his writings and by the cordial recognition which
he won in both countries, to allay the soreness which the second war,
of 1812-15, had left between England and America.  He was well fitted
for the task of mediator.  Conservative by nature, early drawn to the
venerable worship of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his tastes,
with a preference for the past and its historic associations, which,
even in young America, led him to invest the Hudson and the region
about New York with a legendary interest, he wrote of American themes
in an English fashion, and interpreted