The Beginning.—The present race of Americans who are of English lineage—that is, the most numerous and decidedly the dominant portion of the American people of to-day—are the direct descendants of the crowds of Englishmen who came to America in the seventeenth century. Our first literary period, therefore, fills the larger part of that century in which American civilisation had its planting; even as its training into some maturity and power has been the business of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Of course, also, the most of the men who produced American literature during that period were immigrant authors of English birth and English culture; while the most of those who have produced American literature in the subsequent periods have been authors of American birth and of American culture. Notwithstanding their English birth, these first writers in America were Americans: we may not exclude them from our story of American literature. They founded that literature; they are its Fathers; they stamped their spiritual lineaments upon it; and we shall never deeply enter into the meaning of American literature in its later forms without tracing it back, affectionately, to its beginning with them. At the same time, our first literary epoch cannot fail to bear traces of the fact that nearly all the men who made it were Englishmen who had become Americans merely by removing to America. American life, indeed, at once reacted upon their minds, and began to give its tone and hue to their words; and for every reason, what they wrote here, we rightfully claim as a part of American literature; but England has a right to claim it likewise as a part of English literature. Indeed England and America are joint proprietors of this first tract of the great literary territory which we have undertaken to survey.

Since the earliest English colonists upon these shores began to make a literature as soon as they arrived here, it follows that we can fix the exact date of the birth of American literature. It is that year 1607, when Englishmen, by transplanting themselves to America, first began to be Americans. Thus may the history of our literature be traced back from the present hour, as it recedes along the track of our national life, through the early days of the republic, through five generations of colonial existence, until, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, it is merged in its splendid parentage—the written speech of England.

The First Writer.—Among those first Englishmen huddled together behind palisadoes in Jamestown in 1607, were some who laid the foundations of American literature, and there was one who still has a considerable name in the world. When he first set foot in Virginia, Captain John Smith was only twenty-seven years old; but even then he had made himself somewhat famous in England as a daring traveller in Southern Europe, in Turkey and the East. This extremely vivid and resolute man comes before us for study, not because he was the most conspicuous person in the first successful American colony, but because he was the writer of the first book in American literature. A True Relation of Virginia is of deep interest to us, not only on account of its graphic style and the strong light it throws upon the very beginning of our national history, but as being unquestionably the earliest book in American literature. It was written during the first thirteen months of the life of the first American colony, and gives a simple and picturesque account of the stirring events which took place there during that time, under his own eye. After all the abatements which a fair criticism must make from the praise of Captain John Smith either as a doer or as a narrator, his writings still make upon us the impression of a certain personal largeness in him, magnanimity, affluence, sense, and executive force. As a writer his merits are really great—clearness, force, vividness, picturesque and dramatic energy, a diction racy and crisp; and during the first two decades of the seventeenth century he did more than any other Englishman to make an American nation and an American literature possible.

William Strachey.—During the first decade of American literature a little book was written in Virginia, which, as is believed by some authors, soon rendered an illustrious service to English literature by suggesting to Shakespeare the idea of one of his noblest masterpieces, The Tempest. It was in May, 1610, that Sir Thomas Gates, with two small vessels and 150 companions, had at last found his way into the James River after a voyage of almost incredible difficulty and peril. Among those who had borne a part in this ghastly and almost miraculous expedition was William Strachey, of whom but little is known except what is revealed in his own writings. He was a man of decided literary aptitude. Soon after his arrival here he was made secretary of Virginia, and in July, 1610, he wrote at Jamestown and sent off to England A True Reportory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas. Whoever reads this little book will be quite ready to believe that it may have brought suggestion and inspiration even to the genius of William Shakespeare. It is a book of marvellous power. Its account of Virginia is well done; but its most striking merit is its delineation of his dreadful sea-voyage, and particularly of the tempest which, after the terror and anguish of a thousand deaths, drove them upon the rocks of the Bermudas. Here his style becomes magnificent; it has some sentences which for imaginative and pathetic beauty, for vivid implications of appalling danger and disaster, can hardly be surpassed in the whole range of English prose.

George Sandys.—The last one of this group of early writers, George Sandys, was perhaps the only one of all his fellow-craftsmen here who was a professed man of letters. He was well known as a traveller in Eastern lands, as a scholar, as an admirable prose-writer, but especially as a poet. His claim to the title of poet then rested chiefly on his fine metrical translation of the first five books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This fragment was a specimen of literary workmanship in many ways creditable; and that he was able, during the next few years, robbing sleep of its rights, to complete his noble translation of the fifteen books, is worthy of being chronicled among the heroisms of authorship. In 1626, he brought out in London, in a folio volume, the first edition of his finished work. The writings which precede this book in our literary history were all produced for some immediate practical purpose, and not with any avowed literary intentions. This book may well have for us a sort of sacredness, as being the first monument of English poetry, of classical scholarship, and of deliberate literary art, reared on these shores. And when we open the book, and examine it with reference to its merits, first, as a faithful rendering of the Latin text, and, second, as a specimen of fluent, idiomatic, and musical English poetry, we find that in both particulars it is a work that we may be proud to claim as in some sense our own, and to honour as the morning-star at once of poetry and of scholarship in the New World.

The Burwell Papers.—In the year 1676 there occurred in Virginia an outburst of popular excitement which, for a hundred and fifty years afterward, was grotesquely misrepresented by the historians, and which only within recent years has begun to work itself clear of the traditional perversion. This excitement is still indicated by the sinister name that was at first applied to it, Bacon’s Rebellion. With this remarkable event the literary history of Virginia now becomes curiously involved.

In the spring of 1676, at the very moment when the minds of men were torn by anxieties at the lawless interference of the King and Parliament with their most valuable rights, suddenly there swept toward them the terror of an aggressive Indian war. The people called upon the royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, to take the necessary measures for repelling these assaults. For reasons of jealousy, indolence, selfishness, and especially avarice, this Governor gave to the people promises of help, and promises only. Then the people arose in their anger, and since their Governor would not lead them to the war, with unanimous voice they called upon one of their own number to be their leader, Nathaniel Bacon, a man only thirty years of age, of considerable landed wealth, of high social connections, a lawyer trained in the Inns of Court in London, an orator of commanding eloquence, a man who by his endowments of brain and eye and hand was a natural leader and king of men. He obeyed the call of the people and led them against the Indians, whom he drove back with tremendous punishment. But by the jealous and haughty despot in the governor’s chair, he was at once proclaimed a rebel; a price was set upon his head; and the people who followed him were put under ban. Then followed a series of swift conflicts, military and political, between Bacon and the Governor; and at last, in that same year, Bacon himself died, suddenly and mysteriously, and twenty-five persons were hung or shot.

Shortly after our Revolutionary War, it was discovered that in an old and honourable family in the Northern Neck of Virginia, some manuscripts had been preserved, evidently belonging to the seventeenth century, evidently written by one or more of the adherents of Nathaniel Bacon. These manuscripts are sometimes called the Burwell Papers, from the name of a family in King William County by whom they were first given to the public. The author of the prose portion of these manuscripts reflects, on this side of the ocean, the literary foibles that were in fashion on the other side of the ocean. But apart from the disagreeable air of verbal affectation and of effort in these writings, they are undeniably spirited; they produce before us departed scenes with no little energy and life; and the flavour of mirth which seasons them is not unpleasant.

As the cause of Bacon’s death was a mystery, so a mystery covered even the place of his burial; for his friends, desiring to save his lifeless body from violation at the hands of the victorious party, placed it secretly in the earth. And the love of Bacon’s followers, which in his lifetime had shown itself in services of passionate devotion, and which, after his death, thus hovered as a protecting silence over his hidden grave, found expression also in some sorrowing verses that, upon the whole, are of astonishing poetic merit. Who may have been the author of these verses, it is perhaps now impossible to discover. They are prefaced by the quaint remark that after Bacon “was dead, he was bemoaned in lines drawn by the man that waited upon his person as it is said, and who attended his corpse to their burial-place.” Of course this statement is but a blind; the author of such a eulogy of the dead rebel could not safely avow himself. But certainly no menial of Bacon’s, no mere “man that waited upon his person,” could have written this noble dirge, which has a stateliness, a compressed energy, and a mournful eloquence, reminding one of the commemorative verse of Ben Jonson.

Early Literature in Virginia and New England.—During the first epoch in the history of American literature, there were but two localities which produced in the English language anything that can be called literature,—Virginia and New England. As we have seen, there were in Virginia, during the first twenty years of its existence, authors who produced writings that live yet and deserve to live. But at the end of that period and for the remainder of the century, nearly all literary activity in Virginia ceased; the only exception to this statement being the brief anonymous literary memorials which have come down to us from the uprising of the people under Nathaniel Bacon. Even of those writers of the first two decades, all excepting one, Alexander Whitaker, “the Apostle of Virginia,” flitted back to England after a brief residence in Virginia: so that besides Whitaker, the colony had during all that period no writer who gave his name to her as being willing to identify himself permanently with her fate, and to live and die in her immediate service. This, as we shall see, is in startling contrast to the contemporaneous record of New England, which, even in that early period, had a great throng of writers, nearly all of whom took root in her soil.

New England Traits in the Seventeenth Century.—Did the people of New England in their earliest age begin to produce a literature? Who can doubt it? With their incessant activity of brain, with so much both of common and of uncommon culture among them, with intellectual interests so lofty and strong, with so many outward occasions to stir their deepest passions into the same great currents, it would be hard to explain it had they indeed produced no literature. Moreover, contrary to what is commonly asserted of them, they were not without a literary class. In as large a proportion to the whole population as was then the case in the mother-country, there were in New England many men trained to the use of books, accustomed to express themselves fluently by voice and pen, and not so immersed in the physical tasks of life as to be deprived of the leisure for whatever writing they were prompted to undertake. It was a literary class made up of men of affairs, country-gentlemen, teachers, above all of clergymen; men of letters who did not depend upon letters for their bread, and who thus did their work under conditions of intellectual independence.

For the study of literature, they turned with eagerness to the ancient classics; read them freely; quoted them with apt facility. Though their new home was but a province, their minds were not provincial: they had so stalwart and chaste a faith in the ideas which brought them to America as to think that wherever those ideas were put into practice, there was the metropolis. In the public expression of thought they limited themselves by restraints which, though then prevalent in all parts of the civilised world, now seem shameful and intolerable: the printing-press in New England during the seventeenth century was in chains. The first was set up at Cambridge in 1639, under the auspices of Harvard College; and for the subsequent twenty-three years the president of that college was in effect responsible for the good behaviour of the terrible machine. His control of it did not prove sufficiently vigilant. The fears of the clergy were excited by the lenity that had permitted the escape into the world of certain books which tended “to open the door of heresy”; therefore, in 1662 two official licensers were appointed, without whose consent nothing was to be printed. Even this did not make the world seem safe; and two years afterward the law was made more stringent. Other licensers were appointed; excepting the one at Cambridge no printing-press was to be allowed in the colony; and if from the printing-press that was allowed, anything should be printed without the permission of the licensers, the peccant engine was to be forfeited to the government and the printer himself was to be forbidden the exercise of his profession. But even the new licensers were not severe enough. In the leading colony of New England legal restraints upon printing were not entirely removed until about twenty-one years before the Declaration of Independence.

The chief literary disadvantages of New England were, that her writers lived far from the great repositories of books, and far from the central currents of the world’s best thinking; that the lines of their own literary activity were few; and that, though they nourished their minds upon the Hebrew Scriptures and upon the classics of the Roman and Greek literatures, they stood aloof, with a sort of horror, from the richest and most exhilarating types of classic writing in their own tongue. In many ways their literary development was stunted and stiffened by the narrowness of Puritanism. Nevertheless, what they lacked in symmetry of culture and in range of literary movement, was something which the very integrity of their natures was sure to compel them, either in themselves or in their posterity, to acquire.

William Bradford.—William Bradford, of the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock, deserves the pre-eminence of being called the father of American history. After he had been in America ten years and had seen proof of the permanent success of the heroic movement in which he was a leader, his mind seems to have been possessed by the historic significance of that movement; and thenceforward for twenty years he gave his leisure to the composition of a work in which the story of the settlement of New England should be told in a calm, just, and authentic manner. The result was his History of Plymouth Plantation. There is no other document upon New England history that can take precedence of this either in time or in authority. Governor Bradford wrote of events that had passed under his own eye, and that had been shaped by his own hand; and he had every qualification of a trustworthy narrator. His mind was placid, grave, well-poised; he was a student of many books and of many languages; and being thus developed both by letters and by experience, he was able to tell well the truth of history as it had unfolded itself during his own strenuous and benignant career. His history is an orderly, lucid, and most instructive work; it contains many tokens of its author’s appreciation of the nature and requirements of historical writing; and though so recently—1855—published in a perfect form, it must henceforth take its true place at the head of American historical literature, and win for its author the patristic dignity that we have ascribed to him.

John Winthrop.—In the early spring of 1630, a fleet of four vessels sailed out into the sea from a beautiful harbour in the Isle of Wight, their prows pointed westward. On board that fleet were the greatest company of wealthy and cultivated persons that have ever emigrated in any one voyage from England to America. They were prosperous English Puritans. Foremost among them in intellectual power and in weight of character was John Winthrop, already chosen Governor of the Massachusetts Company, and qualified by every personal trait to be the conductor and the statesman of the new Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay. Immediately upon going on board ship he began a piece of writing, which he continued to work at not only during the rest of the voyage but during the rest of his life, and which is a treasure beyond price among our early historic memorials,—The History of New England. His plan was to jot down significant experiences in the daily life of his company, not only while at sea but after their arrival in America. For almost twenty years the story went forward, from 1630 until a few weeks before the writer’s death in 1649. It is quite evident that Winthrop wrote what he did with the full purpose of having it published as a history; but he wrote it amid the hurry and weariness of his unloitering life, with no anxiety about style, with no other purpose than to tell the truth in plain and honest fashion. There is one portion of this History that has acquired great celebrity: it is the one embodying Winthrop’s speech, in 1645, in the general court, on his being acquitted of the charge of having exceeded his authority as deputy-governor. One passage of it, containing Winthrop’s statement of the nature of liberty, is of pre-eminent merit, worthy of being placed by the side of the weightiest and most magnanimous sentences of John Locke or Algernon Sidney. A distinguished American publicist has declared that this is the best definition of liberty in the English language, and that in comparison with it what Blackstone says about liberty seems puerile.1

Descriptions of Nature.—A delightful group of writings belonging to our earliest age is made up of those which preserve for us, in the very words of the men themselves, the curiosity, the awe, the bewilderment, the fresh delight, with which the American Fathers came face to face for the first time with the various forms of nature and of life in the New World. Examples of this class of writings were produced by the early men of Virginia; and among the founders of New England there was no lack of the same sensitiveness to the vast, picturesque, and novel aspects of nature which they encountered upon the sea and the land, in their first journeys hither. The evidence of this fact is scattered thick through all their writings, in letters, sermons, histories, poems; while there remain several books, written by them immediately after their arrival here, describing in the first glow of elated feeling the vision that unfolded itself before them of the new realms of existence upon which they were entering.

Theological Writers.—Without doubt, the sermons produced in New England during the colonial times, and especially during the seventeenth century, are the most authentic and characteristic revelations of the mind of New England for all that wonderful epoch. The theological and religious writings of early New England may not now be readable; but they are certainly not despicable. They represent an enormous amount of subtile, sustained, and sturdy brain-power. They are, of course, grave, dry, abstruse, dreadful; to our debilitated attentions they are hard to follow; in style they are often uncouth and ponderous; they are technical in the extreme; they are devoted to a theology that yet lingers in the memory of mankind only through certain shells of words long since emptied of their original meaning. Nevertheless, these writings are monuments of vast learning, and of a stupendous intellectual energy both in the men who produced them and in the men who listened to them. Of course they can never be recalled to any vital human interest. They have long since done their work in moving the minds of men. Few of them can be cited as literature. In the mass, they can only be labelled by the antiquarians and laid away upon shelves to be looked at occasionally as curiosities of verbal expression, and as relics of an intellectual condition gone for ever. They were conceived by noble minds; they are themselves noble. They are superior to our jests. We may deride them, if we will; but they are not derided.

Of all the great preachers who came to New England in our first age, there were three who, according to the universal opinion of their contemporaries, towered above all others,—Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Cotton. These three could be compared with one another; but with them could be compared no one else. They stood apart, above rivalry, above envy. In personal traits they differed; they were alike in bold and energetic thinking, in massiveness of erudition, in a certain overpowering personal persuasiveness, in the gift of fascinating and resistless pulpit oratory.

“The Simple Cobbler of Agawam.”—Soon after his arrival in Massachusetts, Nathaniel Ward became minister to a raw settlement of Puritans at Agawam, the beautiful Indian name of that district, afterward foolishly exchanged for Ipswich. Early in 1645, he commenced writing the remarkable book, The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, which will keep for him a perpetual place in early American literature. It had the good fortune to fit the times and the passions of men; it was caught up into instant notice, and ran through four editions within the first year. The Simple Cobbler of Agawam may be described as a prose satire upon what seemed to the author to be the frightful license of new opinions in his time, both in New England and at home; upon the frivolity of women and the long hair of men; and finally upon the raging storm of English politics, in the strife then going forward between sects, parties, Parliament, and King. It is a tremendous partisan pamphlet. After all, the one great trait in this book which must be to us the most welcome, is its superiority to the hesitant, imitative, and creeping manner that is the sure sign of a provincial literature. The first accents of literary speech in the American forests seem not to have been provincial, but free, fearless, natural. Our earliest writers, at any rate, wrote the English language spontaneously, forcefully, like honest men. We shall have to search in some later period of our intellectual history to find, if at all, a race of literary snobs and imitators—writers who in their thin and timid ideas, their nerveless diction, and their slavish simulation of the supposed literary accent of the mother-country, make confession of the inborn weakness and beggarliness of literary provincials.

Roger Williams.—From his early manhood even down to his late old age, Roger Williams stands in New England a mighty and benignant form, always pleading for some magnanimous idea, some tender charity, the rectification of some wrong, the exercise of some sort of forbearance toward men’s bodies or souls. He became an uncompromising Separatist. By the spectacle of the white men helping themselves freely to the lands of the red men, he became an assailant of the validity, in that particular, of the New England charters. Roger Williams also held that it was a shocking thing—one of the abominations of the age—for men who did not even pretend to have religion in their hearts, to be muttering publicly the words of religion with their mouths; and that such persons ought not to be called on to perform any acts of worship, even the taking of an oath. Finally, he held another doctrine, that the power of the civil magistrate “extends only to the bodies and goods and outward state of men,” and not at all to their inward state, their consciences, their opinions. For these four crimes, particularly mentioned by Governor Haynes in pronouncing sentence upon him, Massachusetts deemed it unsafe to permit such a nefarious being as Roger Williams to abide anywhere within her borders.

The illustrious Westminster Assembly of Divines had been in session since July, 1643. Already the Presbyterians in it had come to hard blows with the Congregationalists in it, with respect to the form of church government to be erected in England upon the ruins of the Episcopacy. On that subject Roger Williams had a very distinct opinion. While some were for having the new national church of this pattern, and others were for having it of that, Roger Williams boldly stepped two or three centuries ahead of his age, and affirmed that there should be no national church at all. Putting his argument into the differential form of mere questions, he published, in 1644, what he called Queries of Highest Consideration. This, of course, was stark and dreadful heresy; but it was heresy for which Roger Williams had already suffered loss and pain, and was prepared to suffer more. Above all, his nature had become absolutely clear in its adjustment of certain grand ideas, of which the chief was liberty of soul. On behalf of that idea, having now an opportunity to free his mind, he resolved to do so, keeping nothing back; and accordingly, almost upon the heels of the little book that has just been mentioned, he sent out another—not a little one; a book of strong, limpid, and passionate argument, glorious for its intuitions of the world’s coming wisdom, and in its very title flinging out defiantly a challenge to all comers. He called it The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. His book reached in due time the library of John Cotton, and stirred him up to make a reply, which bore a title reverberating that given by Roger Williams to his book: The Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb. Cotton’s book quickly found Roger Williams, at his home in Rhode Island, and of course aroused him to write a rejoinder. Its title is a reiteration of that given to his former work, and is likewise a characteristic retort upon the modification made of it by his antagonist: The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton’s Endeavour to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb. This book is the most powerful of the writings of Roger Williams. There are three principal matters argued in it,—the nature of persecution, the limits of the power of the civil sword, and the tolerance already granted by Parliament.

With Roger Williams, the mood for composition seems to have come in gusts. His writings are numerous; but they were produced spasmodically and in clusters, amid long spaces of silence. He is known to have written two or three works which were never printed at all, and which are now lost. In 1652, he published, in addition to his rejoinder to John Cotton, two small treatises. From that time, no book of his was given to the press until the year 1676, when he published at Boston a quarto volume of nearly 350 pages, embodying his own report of a series of stormy public debates, which he had held in Rhode Island, not long before, with certain robust advocates of Quakerism. This book bears a punning title, George Fox Digged out of his Burrows. Besides those of his writings that were intended for books, there are many in the form of letters, some addressed to the public, most of them to his personal friends. In these letters, which cover his whole life from youth to old age, we seem to get very near to the man himself.

Puritanism and Poetry.—A happy surprise awaits those who come to the study of the early literature of New England with the expectation of finding it altogether arid in sentiment, or void of the spirit and aroma of poetry. The New Englander of the seventeenth century was indeed a typical Puritan; and it will hardly be said that any typical Puritan of that century was a poetical personage. In proportion to his devotion to the ideas that won for him the derisive honour of his name, was he at war with nearly every form of the beautiful. He himself believed that there was an inappeasable feud between religion and art; and hence the duty of suppressing art was bound up in his soul with the master-purpose of promoting religion. Hence, very naturally, he turned away likewise from certain great and splendid types of literature,—from the drama, from the playful and sensuous verse of Chaucer and his innumerable sons, from the secular prose writings of his contemporaries, and from all forms of modern lyric verse except the Calvinistic hymn. Nevertheless, the Puritan did not succeed in eradicating poetry from his nature. Of course, poetry was planted there too deep even for his theological grub-hooks to root it out. Though denied expression in one way, the poetry that was in him forced itself into utterance in another. If his theology drove poetry out of many forms in which it had been used to reside, poetry itself practised a noble revenge by taking up its abode in his theology. Though he stamped his foot in horror and scorn upon many exquisite and delicious types of literary art, yet the idea that filled and thrilled his soul was one in every way sublime, immense, imaginative, poetic. How resplendent and superb was the poetry that lay at the heart of Puritanism, was seen by the sightless eyes of John Milton, whose great epic is indeed the epic of Puritanism. Turning to Puritanism as it existed in New England, we may perhaps imagine it as solemnly declining the visits of the Muses of poetry, sending out to them the blunt but honest message—“Otherwise engaged.” Nothing could be further from the truth. It is an extraordinary fact about these grave and substantial men of New England, especially during our earliest literary age, that they all had a lurking propensity to write what they sincerely believed to be poetry,—and this, in most cases, in unconscious defiance of the edicts of nature and of a predetermining Providence. It is impressive to note, as we inspect our first period, that neither advanced age, nor high office, nor mental unfitness, nor previous condition of respectability, was sufficient to protect any one from the poetic vice. Here and there, even a town-clerk, placing on record the deeply prosaic proceedings of the selectmen, would adorn them in the sacred costume of poetry. Remembering their unfriendly attitude towards art in general, this universal mania of theirs for some forms of the poetic art—this unrestrained proclivity toward the “lust of versification”—must seem to us an odd psychological freak. Or, shall we rather say that it was not a freak at all, but a normal effort of nature, which, being unduly repressed in one direction, is accustomed to burst over all barriers in another? As respects the poetry which was perpetrated by our ancestors, it must be mentioned that a benignant Providence has its own methods of protecting the human family from intolerable misfortune; and that the most of this poetry has perished.

Anne Bradstreet.—There was, however, belonging to this primal literary period, one poet who, in some worthy sense, found in poetry a vocation. The first professional poet of New England was a woman. In the year 1650 there was published, in London, a book of poems written by a gifted young woman of the New England wilderness, Anne Bradstreet by name. She was born in England, in 1612. She was the laborious wife of a New England farmer, the mother of eight children, and herself from childhood of a delicate constitution. The most of her poems were produced between 1630 and 1642, that is, before she was thirty years old; and during these years she had neither leisure, nor elegant surroundings, nor freedom from anxious thoughts, nor even abounding health. Somehow, during her busy lifetime, she contrived to put upon record compositions numerous enough to fill a royal octavo volume of 400 pages,—compositions which entice and reward our reading of them, two hundred years after she lived.

II. SECOND PERIOD (1676–1765)

The Two Periods.—I have taken the year 1676 as the year of partition between the two periods into which our colonial age seems to fall. Before 1676, the new civilisation in America was principally in the hands of Americans born in England; after 1676, it was principally in the hands of Americans born in America, and the subjects of such training as was to be had here. Our first colonial period, therefore, transmits to us a body of writings produced by immigrant Americans; preserving for us the ideas, the moods, the efforts, the very phrases of the men who founded the American nation; representing to us, also, the earliest literary results flowing from the reactions of life in the New World upon an intellectual culture formed in the Old World. Our second colonial period does more: it transmits to us a body of writings, produced in the main by the American children of those immigrants, and representing the earliest literary results flowing from the reactions of life in the New World upon an intellectual culture that was itself formed in the New World. Our first colonial period, just seventy years long, we have now briefly examined. For my part, I have no apology to make for it: I think it needs none. It was a period principally engaged in other tasks than the tasks of the pen; it laid, quietly and well, the foundation of a new social structure that was to cover a hemisphere, was to give shelter and comfort to myriads of the human race, was to endure to centuries far beyond the gropings of our guesswork. Had it done that deed alone, and left no written word at all, not any man since then could have wondered; still less could any man have flung at it the reproach of intellectual lethargy or neglect. But if, besides what it did in the founding of a new commonwealth, we consider what it also did in the founding of a new literature—the muchness of that special work, the downright merit of it—we shall find it hard to withhold from that period the homage of our admiration.

From the year 1676, when our first colonial period ends, there stretches onward a space of just eighty-nine years, at the end of which the American colonies underwent a swift and portentous change,—losing, all at once, their colonial content, and passing suddenly into the earlier and the intellectual stage of their struggle for independence. This space of eighty-nine years forms, of course, our second colonial period.

New England Verse-Writers.—Urian Oakes, born in 1631, was reared in the woods of Concord. The splendid literary capacity of this early American—this product of our pioneer and autochthonous culture—is seen in this: as his sermons are among the noblest specimens of prose to be met with, in that class of writings, during the colonial time, so the one example that is left to us of his verse reaches the highest point touched by American poetry during the same era. The poem thus referred to is an elegy upon the death of a man to whom the poet seems to have been bound by the tenderest friendship,—a poem in fifty-two six-lined stanzas; not without some mechanical defects; blurred also by some patches of the prevailing theological jargon; yet, upon the whole, affluent, stately, pathetic; beautiful and strong with the beauty and strength of true imaginative vision.

In contemporaneous renown, far above all other verse-writers of the colonial time, was Michael Wigglesworth, the explicit and unshrinking rhymer of the Five Points of Calvinism; a poet who so perfectly uttered in verse the religious faith and emotion of Puritan New England that, for more than a hundred years, his writings had universal diffusion there, and a popular influence only inferior to that of the Bible and the Shorter Catechism. No one holding a different theology from that held by Michael Wigglesworth can do justice to him as a poet, without exercising the utmost intellectual catholicity. His verse is quite lacking in art; its ordinary form being a crude, swinging ballad-measure, with a sort of cheap melody, a shrill, reverberating clatter, that would instantly catch and please the popular ear, at that time deaf to daintier and more subtile effects in poetry. In the multitude of his verses, Michael Wigglesworth surpasses all other poets of the colonial time, excepting Anne Bradstreet. Besides numerous minor poems, he is the author of three poetical works of considerable length. One of these, God’s Controversy with New England, was “written in the time of the great drought,” 1662. The argument of the poem is this: “New England planted, prospered, declining, threatened, punished.” The poet holds the opinion, common enough in his day, that before the arrival of the English in America, this continent had been the choice and peculiar residence of the Devil and his angels. Another large poem of Wigglesworth’s is Meat out of the Eater; or, Meditations concerning the Necessity, End, and Usefulness of Afflictions unto God’s Children, all tending to prepare them for and comfort them under the Cross. Here we have simply the Christian doctrine of comfort in sorrow, translated into metrical jingles. It was first published, probably, in 1669; ten years afterward, it had passed through at least four editions; and during the entire colonial age, it was a much-read manual of solace in affliction. But the masterpiece of Michael Wigglesworth’s genius, and his most delectable gift to an admiring public, was that blazing and sulphurous poem, The Day of Doom; or, A poetical Description of the great and last Judgment. This great poem, which, with entire unconsciousness, attributes to the Divine Being a character the most execrable and loathsome to be met with, perhaps, in any literature, Christian or pagan, had for a hundred years a popularity far exceeding that of any other work, in prose or verse, produced in America before the Revolution. The eighteen hundred copies of the first edition were sold within a single year; which implies the purchase of a copy of The Day of Doom by at least every thirty-fifth person then in New England,—an example of the commercial success of a book never afterward equalled in this country. Since that time, the book has been repeatedly published; at least once in England, and at least eight times in America—the last time being in 1867.

The Dynasty of the Mathers.—At the time of his arrival in Boston—August, 1635—Richard Mather was thirty-nine years of age; a man of extensive and precise learning in the classics, in the Scriptures, and in divinity; already a famous preacher. This man, “the progenitor of all the Mathers in New England,” and the first of a line of great preachers and great men of letters that continued to hold sway there through the entire colonial era, had in himself the chief traits that distinguished his family through so long a period;—great physical endurance, a voracious appetite for the reading of books, an alarming propensity to the writing of books, a love of political leadership in church and state, the faculty of personal conspicuousness, finally, the homiletic gift. His numerous writings were, of course, according to the demand of his time and neighbourhood;—sermons, a catechism, a treatise on justification, public letters upon church government, several controversial documents, the preface to the Old Bay Psalm Book, and many of the marvels of metrical expression to be viewed in the body of that work.

Of the six sons of Richard Mather, four became famous preachers, two of them in Ireland and in England, other two in New England; the greatest of them all being the youngest, born at Dorchester, June 21, 1639, and at his birth adorned with the name of Increase, in graceful recognition of “the increase of every sort, wherewith God favoured the country about the time of his nativity.” Even in childhood he began to display the strong and eager traits that gave distinction and power to his whole life, and that bore him impetuously through the warfare of eighty-four mortal years. In 1657, on his eighteenth birthday, he preached in his father’s pulpit his first sermon. From 1661 to 1664 he divided his services between his father’s church at Dorchester and the North Church of Boston. At last, in 1664, he consented to be made minister of the latter church, which, thenceforward, to the end of his own life, and to the end of the life of his more famous son, continued to be the tower and the stronghold of the Mathers in America. Here, then, was a person, born in America, bred in America,—a clean specimen of what America could do for itself in the way of keeping up the brave stock of its first imported citizens. As to learning, he even exceeded all other New Englanders of the colonial time, except his own son, Cotton. His power as a pulpit-orator was very great. It was a common saying of his contemporaries, that Increase Mather was “a complete preacher.” From a literary point of view, his writings certainly have considerable merit. The publications of Increase Mather defy mention, except in the form of a catalogue. From the year 1669, when he had reached the age of thirty, until the year 1723, when he died, hardly a twelvemonth was permitted to pass in which he did not solicit the public attention through the press. An authentic list of his works would include at least ninety-two titles. Of all the great host of Increase Mather’s publications, perhaps only one can be said to have still any power of walking alive on the earth,—the book commonly known by a name not given to it by the author, Remarkable Providences. It cannot be denied that the conception of the book is thoroughly scientific; for it is to prove by induction the actual presence of supernatural forces in the world. Its chief defect, of course, is its lack of all cross-examination of the witnesses, and of all critical inspection of their testimony, together with a palpable eagerness on the author’s part to welcome, from any quarter of the earth or sea or sky, any messenger whatever who may be seen hurrying toward Boston with his mouth full of marvels.

In the intellectual distinction of the Mather family, there seemed to be, for at least three generations, a certain cumulative felicity. The general acknowledgment of this fact is recorded in an old epitaph, composed for the founder of the illustrious tribe:

This overtopping grandson was, of course, none other than Cotton Mather, the literary behemoth of New England in our colonial era; the man whose fame as a writer surpasses, in later times and especially in foreign countries, that of any other pre-Revolutionary American, excepting Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. The most famous book produced by him—the most famous book, likewise, produced by any American during the colonial time—is Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its first Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord 1698. The Magnalia is, indeed, what the author called it, “a bulky thing,”—the two volumes of the latest edition having upwards of thirteen hundred pages. The Magnalia has great merits; it has, also, fatal defects. In its mighty chaos of fables and blunders and misrepresentations, are of course lodged many single facts of the utmost value, personal reminiscences, social gossip, snatches of conversations, touches of description, traits of character and life, that can be found nowhere else, and that help us to paint for ourselves some living picture of the great men and the great days of early New England; yet herein, also, history and fiction are so jumbled and shuffled together that it is never possible to tell, without other help than the author’s, just where the fiction ends and the history begins. On no disputed question of fact is the unaided testimony of Cotton Mather of much weight. The true place of Cotton Mather in our literary history is indicated when we say that he was the last, the most vigorous, and, therefore, the most disagreeable representative of the Fantastic School in literature; and that he prolonged in New England the methods of that school even after his most cultivated contemporaries there had outgrown them, and had come to dislike them. The expulsion of the beautiful from thought, from sentiment, from language; a lawless and a merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent; strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantries, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, monstrosities of phrase;—these are the traits of Cotton Mather’s writing, even as they are the traits common to that perverse and detestable literary mood that held sway in different countries of Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its birthplace was Italy; New England was its grave; Cotton Mather was its last great apostle.

Samuel Mather, the son of Cotton Mather, was born in 1706. In him, evidently, the ancestral fire had become almost extinct. He had abundant learning; was extremely industrious; published many things; but there was not in them, as there was not in him, the victorious energy of an original mind, or even the winning felicity of an imitative one. He was a sturdy and a worthy man. He left no successor to continue the once-splendid dynasty of his tribe. He was the last, and the least, of the Mathers.

The Laity in New England Literature.—In the history of literature in New England during the colonial time, one fact stands out above all others,—the intellectual leadership of the clergy, and that, too, among a laity neither ignorant nor weak. This leadership was in every sense honourable, both for the leaders and the led. It was not due alone to the high authority of the clerical office in New England; it was due still more to the personal greatness of the men who filled that office, and who themselves made the office great. They were intellectual leaders because they deserved to be; for, living among a well-educated and high-spirited people, they knew more, were wiser, were abler, than all other persons in the community. Of such a leadership, it was an honour even to be among the followers. And in the literary achievements of New England in the colonial time, the clergy filled by far the largest space, because, in all departments of writing, they did by far the largest amount of work. After the first half-century of New England life, another fact comes into notice,—the advance of the laity in literary activity. By that time, many strong and good men, who had been educated there in all the learning of the age, either not entering the clerical profession or not remaining in it, began to organise and to develop the other learned professions—the legal, medical, and tuitionary—and, appealing to the public through various forms of literature, to divide more and more with the clergy the leadership of men’s minds. Moreover, in the last decade of the seventeenth century, an attempt was made to establish a newspaper in New England. The attempt failed. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, another attempt was made, and did not fail; and long before the end of our colonial epoch, a new profession had come into existence, having a power to act on the minds of men more mightily than any other,—the profession of journalism.

The Almanac.—No one who would penetrate to the core of early American literature, and would read in it the secret history of the people in whose minds it took root and from whose minds it grew, may by any means turn away, in lofty literary scorn, from the almanac. The earliest record of this species of literature in America carries us back to the very beginning of printed literature in America; for, next after a sheet containing The Freeman’s Oath, the first production that came from the printing-press in this country was An Almanac calculated for New England, by Mr. Pierce, and printed at Cambridge, in 1639. Thenceforward for a long time, scarcely a year passed over that solitary printing-press at Cambridge without receiving a similar salute from it. In 1676, Boston itself grew wise enough to produce an almanac of its own. Ten years afterward, Philadelphia began to send forth almanacs—a trade in which, in the following century, it was to acquire special glory. In 1697, New York entered the same enticing field of enterprise. The first almanac produced in Rhode Island was in 1728; the first almanac produced in Virginia was in 1731. In 1733, Benjamin Franklin began to publish what he called Poor Richard’s Almanac, to which his own personal reputation has given a celebrity surpassing that of all other almanacs published anywhere in the world. Thus, year by year, with the multiplication of people and of printing-presses in this country, was there a multiplication of almanacs, some of them being of remarkable intellectual and even literary merit. Throughout our colonial time, when larger books were costly and few, the almanac had everywhere a hearty welcome and frequent perusal.

History and Biography in New England.—The one form of secular literature for which, during the entire colonial age, the writers of New England had the most authentic vocation is history. Our second literary period produced four considerable historians,—William Hubbard, Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, Thomas Hutchinson: the first two excelling in popularity all other historians of the colonial time; the last two excelling all others in specific training for the profession of history, and in the conscious accumulation of materials for historic work. Of that species of history which is devoted to the lives of individuals rather than of communities, there were many specimens produced in the colonial epoch. But it is a singular fact that, in literary quality, the biographies written in colonial New England are far inferior to its histories.

Pulpit Literature in New England.—In our progress over the various fields of literature in New England during the colonial time, we encounter not one form of writing in which we are permitted to lose sight of the clergy of New England,—their tireless and versatile activity, their learning, their force of brain, their force of character. The immigrant clergy of New England—the founders of this noble and brilliant order—were, in nearly all qualities of personal worth and greatness, among the greatest and the worthiest of their time, in the mother-country,—mighty scholars, orators, sages, saints. And by far the most wonderful thing about these men is, that they were able to convey across the Atlantic, into a naked wilderness, all the essential elements of that ancient civilisation out of which they came; and, at once, to raise up and educate, in the New World, a line of mighty successors in their sacred office, without the least break in the sequence, without the slightest diminution in scholarship, in eloquence, in intellectual energy, in moral power.

Jonathan Edwards.—Jonathan Edwards, the most original and acute thinker yet produced in America, was born in 1703; in 1758 he was installed as president of the College of New Jersey, and died a few weeks afterward. Both by his father and by his mother, he came of the gentlest and most intellectual stock in New England. In early childhood, he began to manifest those powerful, lofty, and beautiful endowments, of mind and of character, that afterward distinguished him,—spirituality, conscientiousness, meekness, simplicity, disinterestedness, and a marvellous capacity for the acquisition of knowledge and for the prosecution of independent thought. It is, perhaps, impossible to name any department of intellectual exertion, in which, with suitable outward facilities, he might not have achieved supreme distinction. Certainly, he did enough to show that had he given himself to mathematics, or to physical science, or to languages, or to literature—especially the literature of imagination and of wit—he would have become one of the world’s masters. The traditions of his family, the circumstances of his life, the impulses derived from his education and from the models of personal greatness before his eyes, all led him to give himself to mental science and divinity; and in mental science and divinity, his achievements will be remembered to the end of time.

III. GENERAL LITERARY FORCES IN THE COLONIAL TIME

Colonial Isolation.—The study of American literature in the colonial time is the study of a literature produced, in isolated portions, at the several local seats of English civilisation in America. Before the year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people, but many American peoples. At the various centres of our colonial life—Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts—there were, indeed, populations of the same English stock; but these populations differed widely in personal and social peculiarities—in spirit, in opinion, in custom. The germs of a future nation were here, only they were far apart, unsympathetic, at times even unfriendly. No cohesive principle prevailed, no centralising life; each little nation was working out its own destiny in its own fashion. In general, the characteristic note of American literature in the colonial time is, for New England, scholarly, logical, speculative, unworldly, rugged, sombre; and as one passes southward along the coast, across other spiritual zones, this literary note changes rapidly toward lightness and brightness, until it reaches the sensuous mirth, the satire, the persiflage, the gentlemanly grace, the amenity, the jocular coarseness, of literature in Maryland, Virginia, and the farther South.

Colonial Fellowship.—On the other hand, the fact must not be overlooked that, while the tendency toward colonial isolation had its way, throughout the entire colonial age, there was also an opposite tendency—a tendency toward colonial fellowship—that asserted itself even from the first, and yet at the first faintly, but afterward with steadily increasing power as time went on; until at last, in 1765, aided by a fortunate blunder in the statesmanship of England, this tendency became suddenly dominant, and led to that united and great national life, without which a united and great national literature here would have been for ever impossible. This august fact of fellowship between the several English populations in America—a fellowship maintained and even strengthened after the original occasion of it had ceased—has perhaps saved the English language in America from finally breaking up into a multitude of mutually repellent dialects; it has certainly saved American literature from the pettiness of permanent local distinctions, from fitfulness in its development, and from disheartening limitations in its audience. Besides these general causes leading toward colonial union,—kinship, religion, commerce, dependence on the same sovereign, peril from the same enemies,—there were three other causes that may be described as purely intellectual—the rise of journalism, the founding of colleges, and the study of physical science. They worked strongly for the development of that intercolonial fellowship without which no national literature would ever have been born here, and, also, were in themselves literary forces of extraordinary importance.

Early American Journalism.—The first newspaper ever published in America appeared in Boston in 1690, and was named Public Occurrences. For the crime of uttering “reflections of a very high nature,” it was immediately extinguished by the authorities of Massachusetts,—not even attaining the dignity of a second number. Under this rough blow, the real birth of American journalism hesitated for fourteen years. On April 4, 1704, was published in Boston the first number of an American newspaper that lived. It was called The Boston News-Letter. For fifteen years, it continued to be the only newspaper in America. At last, on December 21, 1719, a rival newspaper was started, named The Boston Gazette; and on the twenty-second day of the same month, in the same year, there appeared in Philadelphia the first newspaper published in this country outside of Boston. This was called The American Weekly Mercury. From that time onward, the fashion of having newspapers spread rapidly. Nearly all of these newspapers were issued once each week; many of them were on diminutive sheets; and for a long time all of them clung to the prudent plan of publishing only news and advertisements, abstaining entirely from the audacity of an editorial opinion, or disguising that dangerous luxury under pretended letters from correspondents. News from Europe,—when it was to be had,—and especially news from England, occupied a prominent place in these little papers; but, necessarily, for each one, the affairs of its own colony, and next, the affairs of the other colonies, furnished the principal items of interest. Thus it was that early American journalism, even though feeble, sluggish, and timid, began to lift the people of each colony to a plane somewhat higher than its own boundaries, and to enable them, by looking abroad, this way and that, upon the proceedings of other people in this country, and upon other interests as precious as their own, to correct the pettiness and the selfishness of mere localism in thought. Colonial journalism was a necessary and a great factor in the slow process of colonial union. Besides this, our colonial journalism soon became, in itself, a really important literary force. It could not remain for ever a mere disseminator of public gossip, or a placard for the display of advertisements. The instinct of critical and brave debate was strong even among those puny editors, and it kept struggling for expression. Moreover, each editor was surrounded by a coterie of friends, with active brains and a propensity to utterance; and these constituted a sort of unpaid staff of editorial contributors, who, in various forms,—letters, essays, anecdotes, epigrams, poems, lampoons,—helped to give vivacity and even literary value to the paper. Our early journalism, likewise, included publications of a more explicit literary intention than the newspapers; publications in which the original work was done with far greater care, and in which far more space was surrendered to literary news and literary criticism, and to the exercise of many sorts of literary talent. The generic name for these publications is the magazine; and the first one issued in this country was by Benjamin Franklin, at Philadelphia, in 1741. By far the most admirable example of our literary periodicals in the colonial time was The American Magazine, published at Philadelphia from October, 1757, to October, 1758, and conducted, according to its own announcement, “by a society of gentlemen.”

Early American Colleges.—No other facts in American history are more creditable to the American people than those which relate to their early and steady esteem for higher education, and especially to their efforts and their sacrifices in the founding of colleges. Before the year 1765, seven colleges were established here: Harvard, in 1636; William and Mary, in 1693; Yale, in 1700; New Jersey, in 1746; King’s—now Columbia—in 1754; Philadelphia—now the University of Pennsylvania—in 1755; Rhode Island—now Brown University—in 1764. Though all these little establishments bore the name of colleges, there were considerable differences among them with respect to the grade and extent of the instruction they furnished,—those founded latest being, in that particular, the most rudimental. Nevertheless, at them all one noble purpose prevailed,—the study of the ancient classics. This extraordinary training in the ancient languages led to forms of proficiency that have no parallel now in American colleges. So early as 1649, President Dunster wrote to Ravius, the famous Orientalist, that some of the students at Harvard could “with ease dexterously translate Hebrew and Chaldee into Greek.” In 1678, there was in that college even an Indian student who wrote Latin and Greek poetry; and this accomplishment continued to be an ordinary one there as late as the Revolutionary War; while the facile use of Latin, whether for conversation or for oratory, was so common among the scholars of Harvard and of Yale as to excite no remark. Nearly all the superior men in public life, after the immigrant generation, were educated at these little colleges; and in all the studies that then engaged the attention of scholars in the Old World, these men, particularly if clergymen, had a scholarship that was, in compass and variety, fully abreast of the learning of the time. The existence here of these early colleges was in many ways a means of colonial fellowship. Each college was itself, in all portions of the country, a point of distinction for its own colony; at each college were gathered some students from other colonies; between all the colleges there grew a sense of fraternity in learning and letters, and this re-enforced the general sense of fraternity in civic destinies; finally, at these colleges was trained no little of that masterly statesmanship of our later colonial time, which, at a glance, interpreted the danger that hung upon the horizon in 1765, proclaimed the imminent need of colonial union, and quickly brought it about. The vast influence that our early colleges exerted upon literary culture can hardly be overstated. Among all the people, they nourished those spiritual conditions out of which, alone, every wholesome and genuine literature must grow; and in their special devotion to classical studies, they imparted to a considerable body of men the finest training for literary work that the world is yet possessed of. It was of incalculable service to American literature that, even in these wild regions of the earth, the accents of Homer, of Thucydides, of Cicero, were made familiar to us from the beginning; that a consciousness of the Æsthetic principle in verbal expression was kept alive here, and developed, by constant and ardent study of the supreme masters of literary form; and that the great, immemorial traditions of literature were borne hither across the Atlantic from their ancient seats, and were here housed in perpetual temples, for the rearing of which the people gladly went to great cost. The tribute of most eloquent homage, which, in 1775, in the House of Lords, the Earl of Chatham paid to the intellectual force, the literary symmetry, and the decorum of the state-papers then recently transmitted from America, and then lying upon the table of that House, was virtually an announcement to Europe of the astonishing news,—that, by means of an intellectual cultivation formed in America, in its own little colleges, on the best models of ancient and modern learning, America had already become not only an integral part of the civilised world, but even a member of the republic of letters.

The Study of Physical Science in America.—The study of physical science in this country began with the very settlement of the country. The writings of the first Americans are strewn with sharp observations on the geography of America, on its minerals, soils, waters, plants, animals; on its climates, storms, earthquakes; on its savage inhabitants, its diseases, its medicines; and on the phenomena of the heavens as they appeared to this part of the earth. There were here, even in our earliest age, several men of special scientific inclination, such as William Wood, John Josselyn, John Sherman, John Winthrop of Massachusetts, and John Winthrop of Connecticut. Indeed, the latter was recognised as an eminent physicist even among the contemporaneous physicists of England; and in Connecticut, where he founded the city of New London, and where he was for many years Governor, he pursued with great zeal his scientific researches, carrying them even into the fatal chase for the philosopher’s stone. He was on terms of endearing intimacy with Watkins, Robert Boyle, and other great leaders of science in England; and it is said that under the menace of public calamities there, and drawn, likewise, by their friendship for Winthrop, these men had proposed to leave England, and to establish in the American colony over which Winthrop presided “a society for promoting natural knowledge.” They were, however, induced by Charles II. to remain in England; and accordingly, with the co-operation of Winthrop, who happened to be in London at the time, they founded there, instead of in New London, the association that soon became renowned throughout the world as the Royal Society. Perhaps there was no one of these early American students of nature whom it is now pleasanter to recall than the Quaker naturalist, John Bartram. Born in Pennsylvania, in 1701, he founded near Philadelphia the first botanic garden in America. He was appointed American botanist to George III., and won from LinnÆus the praise of being “the greatest natural botanist in the world.” As John Bartram represents high attainments in science reached under all outward disadvantages, so John Winthrop of Harvard College represents still higher attainments in science reached under all outward advantages. A descendant of the first Governor of Massachusetts, from 1738 until his death in 1779 he served his Alma Mater with great distinction as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. For extent and depth of learning in his special departments, he was probably the foremost American of his day. All things considered, he was probably the most symmetrical example both of scientific and of literary culture produced in America during the colonial time; representing what was highest and broadest in it, what was most robust and most delicate; a thinker and a writer born and bred in a province, but neither in thought nor in speech provincial; an American student of nature and of human nature, who stayed at home, and bringing Europe and the universe to his own door, made himself cosmopolitan. Thus, from the earliest moment of American civilisation, there were, here and there in this country, eager and keen students of nature,—their number greatly multiplying with the passing of the years. But it belongs to the essence of such studies that they who pursue them should seek the fellowship of their own brethren, either for help in solving difficulties or for delight in announcing discoveries; and it is, beyond question, true that the union of the American colonies was first laid in the friendly correspondence and intellectual sympathies of students of physical science, who from an early day were dispersed through these colonies. By the year 1740, the American students of nature had become a multitude; and from that year to the year 1765, the glory of physical research among us culminated in the brilliant achievements of Benjamin Franklin, whose good fortune it then was to enable his country to step at once to the van of scientific discovery, and for a few years to be the teacher of the world on the one topic of physical inquiry then uppermost in men’s thoughts. In proposing the formation of the American Philosophical Society, this wonderful man had announced to his own countrymen that the time had come for them to make new and greater exertions for the enlargement of human knowledge. Inspired by the noble enthusiasm of Franklin, whose position brought him into large personal acquaintance in all the colonies, the activity and the range of scientific studies in America were then greatly increased,—a bond of scientific communion that helped to prepare the way for political communion, whenever the hour for that should come. The direct impulse given by all this eager study of physical science to the development of American literature is to be seen not only in scientific writings like those of Winthrop and of Franklin, which have high and peculiar literary merit, but in the general invigoration of American thought, in the development of a sturdy rational spirit, and in a broadening of the field of our intellectual vision.

But, in spite of all these influences working toward colonial fellowship, the prevailing fact in American life, down to the year 1765, was colonial isolation. With that year came the immense event that suddenly swept nearly all minds in the several colonies into the same great current of absorbing thought, and that held them there for nearly twenty years. From the date of that event, we cease to concern ourselves with an American literature in the East or the South, in this colony or in that. Henceforward American literature flows in one great, common stream, and not in petty rills of geographical discrimination,—the literature of one multitudinous people, variegated indeed, in personal traits, but single in its commanding ideas and in its national destinies.