# A History of American Literature/Chapter 2

II.
THE FIRST COLONIAL PERIOD.
1607—1688
The Renaissance. — The Fifteenth Century1340—1400. Geoffrey Chaucer, English poet. 1401. First execution for heresy 1431. Joan of Arc burned. 1440. Printing from movable types made public by Guttenberg. 1453. Constantinople captured by the Turks. 1460—1471. War of the Roses. 1474. Caxton prints the first book in England. 1492. Discovery of the New World. 1497. Cabot discovers North America. Reformation in Germany. Magellan circumnavigates the globe. Cortez discovers Mexico. is the awakening of literature, science, and art, from the long slumber of the Dark Ages. As the direct result of this emancipation of Europe, there came a period of great activity in almost every sphere of action.
The newly invented art of printing with movable types marked an era in the history of book-making; the invention of gunpowder completely revolutionized the science of war, while the mariner's compass marked a turning-point in the history of navigation. Everywhere was to be seen the activity of fresh intellectual life.
Spirit of the Age. — The Sixteenth Century is the age of discovery. Columbus, Cabot, De Gama, Balboa, Magellan, made six world-revolutionizing discoveries in twenty-nine years. Cortez found a wonderland in Mexico,; Pizarro opened up a new El Dorado in Peru; De Soto discov- ​ ered1531. Pizarro subjugates Peru. 1541. De Soto discovers the Mississippi. 1552—1599. Edmund Spencer, English poet. 1552—1618. Sir Walter Raleigh, English historian and poet. 1554—1586. Sir Philip Sidney, poet and knight. 1553—1603. Reign of Elizabeth. 1561—1626. Francis Bacon, English philosopher. 1564—1616. Shakespeare, English poet. 1585. Raleigh's first Virginia colony. 1587. Raleigh's second colony. 1603—1625. Reign of James I. Quebec founded by Champlain. 1608. Quebec founded by Champlain. 1608—1674. John Milton, English poet. 1609. Hudson discovers the Hudson River. a mighty inland river which told of a vast extent of land to the northward, and soon the world was ready to believe almost any marvellous tale.
The new continent, with its strange vegetable and animal life, with its mystery and its wealth, appealed powerfully to the imagination of the masses. It was literally a new world that was opened to the eyes of Europeans, a world peopled by a race of beings as distinct and individual as if the only one ever created on the planet, the objects of the most intense curiosity in the Old World.
It was a century of feverish dreams of new empires, of gold, of conquest. The return of Pizarro from Peru with his shiploads of treasure set all of Europe on fire. Spain, England, and France took the lead, and vied with each other in a mad scramble for the new continent.
The Colonial Age. — (Fisher's Colonial Era, Thwaite's The Colonies: 1492—1750.) The Age of Discovery was succeeded in America by the Colonial Age. The spirt of maritime adventure and exploration which had grown into a passion during the early part of the Sixteenth Century began to subside as the new continent became better known, and the nations now sought to make good to acquired territory by planting colonies.
​America had a powerful influence in moulding the spirit of the age.
"Every great European event affected the fortunes of America. Did a state prosper, it sought an increase of wealth by plantations in the west. Was a sect persecuted, it escaped to the new world." — Bancroft, Vol. II.
The Colonial Age may be divided into two distinct periods, The First Colonial Period, which extends. from 1607, the year of Jamestown settlement, to 1688, the year of the revolution which placed William and Mary on the English throne; and The Second Colonial Period, which opens with the date 1688 and ends in 1765, the year of the Stamp Act and the birth of the Revolutionary spirit in the colonies.
The First Colonial Period (1607—1688).
(Fisher's Colonial Era; Bancroft, Vol. I.; Hildreth, Vol. I.; Lodge's English Colonies in America.) During the eighty-one years included in the first colonial period, thirteen colonies of widely differing characteristics, founded for thirteen different reasons, yet all of them of English stock in the end, were planted along the Atlantic coast of America.
The eighty years were filled with action. It was no easy task to subdue a raw continent. To establish homes in a savage wilderness subject to cruel winters; to hew down the forest; to clear the rocky, stump-strewn fields and fit them for cultivation; to be constantly in terror of wild beasts and savage men,—all of these things called for unrelenting physical toil, and ​left little time to be devoted to the arts and graces of literature.
The whole period produced nothing of literary worth. A few writings, the offspring mainly of necessity, have come down to us, but they are valuable simply as curiosities or as documents for the historian. The period is to be studied not for its literary product, but for the light it throws on our later literary history.
Virginia and Massachusetts. — (Tyler, 83-85; Fiske, Civil Government, 16–19, 57–62; Johns Hopkins University Studies.) The two colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts are all that need be studied in an elementary history of American literature. They are the fountain heads of all that is strongest in our national and our literary history. Planted for widely different reasons, by men of almost opposite traits of character, and for more than a century having no intercourse at all with each other, they at length became the intellectual centres of our early national life. Lowell has called them "The two great distributing centres of the English race" in America. (See Among My Books, 1st series, 239.)
1. VIRGINIA.
So sang the grand old Elizabethan poet, Michael Drayton, when the three vessels that were fitting on the Thames for their memorable voyage were completing arrangements. England had made attempt after attempt during the reign of Elizabeth to establish colonies in her vast possessions in the west, but all of them had failed miserably. But in 1603 it was discovered that Virginia could be reached by sailing due west instead of taking the long dangerous route by way of the West Indies,—a discovery that created great excitement throughout England, and indeed throughout Europe. As a result, large numbers became eager to try their fortunes in the vast unknown El Dorado, now for the first time made accessible. The newly organized London Company soon sent out a fleet of three small ships, which, after being blown about by the winds of the Atlantic from April until December, were at last swept blindly and roughly by a fierce storm into the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The building of the few rude huts which soon arose on the bank of the James was the most significant event that had happened in the new world since its discovery. It marked the opening of a new era in the history of North America.
The Settlers of Virginia. — (Cooke, 16-33; Neill's His​tory of the Virginia Company, 1869; Stith's Settlement of Virginia, 1865.) It will be found important, as throwing light on our later literary development, to look carefully at these early emigrants who laid the foundation of Virginia. Of the one hundred and five men who composed the first expedition, nearly one-half were "gentlemen" with absolutely no experience in manual labor, and a large proportion of the remainder were soldiers and servants. They were of the Royalist party, and the Church of England. Many of them had squandered their ancestral estates and now sought America, led on by dreams of sudden conquest, and dazzling riches. Many were adventurers born of the protracted wars with Spain; some were worthless idlers, and even criminals fleeing from justice. Not one of them dreamed of a permanent home in the new land. They had had no falling out with the mother country; they had no desire to found a new order of society; they were without religious scruples or anything else, save a desire for speedy wealth—for gold that could be picked up in large nuggets without exertion.
Many of the later arrivals, drawn by the rich tobacco plantation, were from the higher classes, yet during the first half-century "the large proportion of the settlers in Virginia were of inferior quality, personally and socially," and many of them were broken men, adventurers, bankrupts, criminals."
The Physical Geography of Virginia had much to do in shaping its history. It has a delightful climate, a soil of marvellous fertility; it is traversed by numerous ​noble rivers, many of them navigable for a long distance from the sea, a fact that made it easy for plantations to rely upon supplies brought by vessels up the rivers, and that made the village grocery store, which was so prominent a feature in New England, a useless institution. The land was early found to be very favorable for the cultivation of tobacco, a crop which exhausts the soil more rapidly than almost any other. It was at first found more profitable to move to new fields after exhausting one plantation than to resort to the use of fertilizers, which accounts for the early scattering of the colonists over a wide area. Tobacco at once became the one crop of Virginia; it made manufacturing impossible. "Its influence," says one writer, "permeated the entire social sphere of the colony, directed its laws, and was an element in all its political and religious disturbances."
Social Conditions. — As a result of these combinations there arose a system of society which was peculiar to Virginia. The people did not settle in villages as in New England, but lived far distant from each other on large estates. "In Jamestown, the capital of the state, there were only eighteen houses." The owner of a large estate, grown rich from the cultivation of tobacco which he shipped, himself, to England, surrounded himself with laborers and slaves and lived in imitation of the owners of the English estates, a free and hospitable life, spending his leisure time in field sports and politics. Two classes of society were the result: the rich landowners, and the poor laborers and slaves. This condition of society made free schools impossible. During the whole ​of the first Colonial period, "no mention is anywhere made in the records of schools, or any provision for the instruction of youth."
Another significant fact is that there was no permanent printing press in the colony until 1729. Education and literature were frowned upon. Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia from 1641 to 1677, in one of his reports remarked:
"I thank God there are no free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both."
It is needless to say that a society made up of such persons, and under such conditions, could not possibly be favorable to the cultivation of literature. Indeed, so unfavorable was it that, during the whole of her history Virginia has not produced a purely literary work of even the second rank. Many of the planters came from the ruling families of England, and from the discipline acquired from the managing of large estates they learned that mastery over men and events that made the state "the Mother of Presidents," of fiery orators and astute statesmen, but the conditions were far from conducive to literary life and effort.
Early Writings in Virginia. — The literature of the Colonial age in Virginia is so scanty and uninteresting as to deserve little attention. Much of it was written for purely practical ends with little thought of finish or literary beauty. Interspersed with this is the work of ​a few English scholars who made a brief sojourn in the new land and then flitted back across the ocean. Of the principal writers of the first Colonial period, all except one, Alexander Whitaker, who had come "to bear the name of God to the heathen" of the New World, returned to England after a few years. The writings of the period may be roughly gathered into four groups:
1. Letters to friends in England. These, written often in haste, with no thought of literary finish, are full of observations on the strange scenes and surroundings into which the lives of their writers had fallen. They are of value now only so far as they throw light on the history, society, and spirit of the age that produced them.
2. Descriptions of the Indians, of the geography of the country, of the new flora and fauna, and of the history of the early days of the settlement. Smith's A True Relation, etc., and A Map of Virginia; and Whitaker's Good News from Virginia, are the best examples of this class of literature.
3. Letters legal, and reports to the Companies in England, as, for example, Smith's Answers to the Seven Questions, etc.
4. Scholarly works written by Englishmen of leisure sojourning for a time in America. These cannot be classed as American Literature any more than Irving's Sketch Book can be called an English book because it was written in England. Among such writings may be mentioned Sandys' translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Captain John Smith (1579-1631).
"The father of Virginia, the true leader who first planted the Saxon race within the borders of the United States." — Bancroft.
A True Relation of Virginia. Letter to the London Company. A Map of Virginia. Life (by William Gilmore Simms; by G. S. Hillard, in Sparks' American Biography. Vol. II.; by C. D. Warner. See also Eggleston's Pocahontas, and Henry Adams' Historical Essays, 42. The chief authorities on the life of Smith are his own autobiographical writings).
The romantic life of Captain John Smith is too well known to need retelling. His character, too, needs no new light shed upon it. We must acknowledge that he was inordinately vain, fond of boasting, impetuous, imperious, restless, yet we know that his shrewdness, his indomitable courage, and his sound judgment more than once saved the Virginia Colony from ruin. "It is not too much to say," writes an eminent English critic, "that bad not Captain Smith strove, fought, and endured as he did, the present United States of America might never have come into existence. It was contrary to all probability that where so many had succumbed already, the Southern Virginia Company's expedition of 1606—7 should have succeeded."
Cooke, the historian of Virginia, writes of Smith:
"His endurance was unshrinking, and his life in Virginia indicated plainly that he had enormous recoil. He was probably never really cast down, and seems to have kept his heart of hope, without an effort in the darkest hours, when all around him despaired."
​Smith as a Writer. — (Tyler, 16-38; Richardson, I., 63-72.) Of the nine works, with American themes, written by Smith, three were composed in Virginia. His first book, written during the thirteen months following the establishment of the colony, and published in London the next year, is doubly interesting, in that it is the first book produced on this continent, and that it tells in detail the story of those memorable months at Jamestown. Its full title is as follows:
"A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath happened in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony, which is now resident in the south part thereof, till the last return from thence.... Written by Captaine Smith, Coronell of said Collony, to a worshipfull friend of his in England. London 1608."
Smith's second work was a very spicy reply to the seven questions put by the London Company, to him as governor of Virginia. With this, Smith sent his third American work, entitled A Map of Virginia, etc., which, however, was not published until 1612.
2. MASSACHUSETTS.
The Pilgrims. — (Bradford and Winslow's Journal, and Bradford's History of the Plymouth Plantation; Palfrey's History of New England; Fiske's Beginnings of New England, 66-104; Doyle's The Puritan Colonies, Vol. II.; Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrims; Drake's The Making of New England, Bancroft, Vol. 1., 194–214.) The small band of adventurers who sought Virginia in 1606, led on by dreams of "pearl and gold," were swept along by a three days' storm and driven as by ​the hand of fate into the noblest bay along the Atlantic1571—1630. Kepler, German astronomer. 1993—1683. Isaac Walton. 1619. Harvey discovers circulation of the blood. 1598—1688. John Bunyan. 1629—1640. No Parliament. 1630. Boston settled. 1631—1700. John Dryden. 1646—1680. The Commonwealth. 1665. Plague in London. 1666. Great London Fire. 1675—1676. King Philipp's War.coast, to a land of wonderful beauty and fruitfulness, at a time when all nature was robed in the freshness and beauty of the early springtime. What a contrast with the Pilgrims, who fourteen years later, wearied by persecution, exiled from their native land, without money or means to return across the sea, even had they desired to do so, were landed on the savage coast of Massachusetts, at the very beginning of a cruel, northern winter. The Virginians had all been men, many of them inured to hardships like war and to lives of adventure, but here were women and little children,—whole families. Many were sick. For months it was a battle with cold, hunger, disease, hostile Indians, wild beasts; a battle for mere existence. Never was there a more unpromising venture as viewed from a practical standpoint; never was there a more discouraging outlook than from the huts of Plymouth during that memorable winter; yet never has there been a venture that has yielded grander results. Dec. 20, 1620, is the most significant date in our history.
Required Reading — Mrs. Hemans' "Landing of the Pilgrims;" Longfellow's "Courtship of Miles Standish." See also Mrs. Child's Hobomok; Mrs. Stowe's The Mayflower, Mrs. Austen's The Standish of Standish, Betty Aiden, Dr. LeBaron and his Daughters, and A Nameless Nobleman
​Puritan Traits. — (Greene's Short History of the English People, III., 19-35; Neale's History of the Puritans; Taine's English Literature, II., ch. v.; Tyler, 91-109; Richardson, I. 10—21.)
The settlers of Massachusetts differed from the early Virginians in almost every respect. They did not seek America for worldly gain; they were not adventurers cast up by the tide of chance, nor were they carried. across the sea by a wave of popular enthusiasm. They were earnest and prayerful, prone to act only after mature deliberation, and they had come to America to stay.
As we study the history of the intellectual development of New England, it must be borne constantly in mind that her founders were deeply religious men. Religion was their vocation. They subordinated everything to this one great, ruling thought. Their convictions were intense and they obeyed them at any cost. Rather than use the book of Common Prayer and wear the robes prescribed for the clergy by the Church of England, they chose to leave all that society holds dear and take wife and child into the wilds across "the vast and furious ocean" where they might be free to worship God as they pleased.
After purchasing religious freedom at such a price, it is but natural that they should be intolerant of those who would pervert their belief, and we are not surprised to find them in turn persecutors. They fiercely assailed the Quakers; they drove Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson into the wilderness, and in Salem hanged nineteen persons suspected of being witches.
​They viewed with alarm the increasing commercial spirit among the New England seaports. In 1663 we hear a venerable Salem clergyman sounding this note of warning:
"It concerneth New England always to remember that she was originally a plantation religions, not a plantation of trade. The profession of the purity of doctrine, worship and discipline is written upon her forehead. Let merchants and such as are increasing cent. per cent. remember this that worldly gain was not the end and design of the people of New England, but religion. If any man anong us make religion as twelve and the world as thirteen, such an one has not the spirit of a true New England man."
Another characteristic of these men was their intense earnestness. They were never idle. Whatever they did, whether in religion, politics, education, or toil for daily bread, they did with their might. Life was a terrible reality. "I am resolved," wrote Jonathan Edwards, "to live with all my might while I do live." They had no time for earthly pleasures. Gayety and beauty, adornment of person or anything even approaching luxury were looked upon as things from Satan. Their lives were sad and cheerless. They disciplined themselves to think constantly on things pertaining to another world. Their God was a terrible being whose awful anger was easily kindled, and the sulphurous glare of the buming pit was kept constantly before the eyes of the careless. If they became more gloomy and superstitious than the Puritans of England, the fact can be easily explained.
They were "surrounded by circumstances and pressed by griefs and anxieties, such as incline to sad and unhealthy meditation.... ​An ocean divided them from the old seats of civilized life. Almost in the primitive nakedness of existence they were waging a contest with the awful elements. Their little settlements were isolated and unjoyous. The scene all around,—river, rock, covert, mountain, forest, almost as wild and sombre as creation left it, invited to stern and melancholy inusing." — Palfrey.
Such were the founders of New England. For ten years after the first settlement, very few ventured to the new colony, but between 1630 and 1640 they came in multitudes. The opening of the Long Parliament during the latter year practically put an end to the Puritan exodus from England, but it has been estimated that there were then twenty-one thousand souls in the fifty towns of New England.
The Physical Geography of New England has greatly affected her development. When the Pilgrims first saw the region, it was covered with an almost unbroken forest. Its surface was rugged and strewn thick with bowlders, the relics of the Glacial Age. The great walls and heaps of stones about the cultivated fields tell of the task it has been to subdue and humanize it. Its rivers, with few exceptions, are not navigable. They come plunging down from the mountain sides, affording wonderful water-powers, the best in the world. Unlike Virginia, the country afforded few inducements to settlers. Large plantations were impossible; tobacco could not be grown with profit; agriculture was confined to the owners of small farms, hillside fields wrested by sheer force from the domain of nature and little tracts along the rivers. These farms produced under severe toil enough to supply their owners with food. Manu​facturing, for which the country is best adapted, was forbidden by England. During the Colonial period there were few exports save lumber, furs, and fish. The last item should not be overlooked, for so important a part did it play in the early history of Massachusetts that, to signify the source of her wealth, the figure of a codfish was hung in the State House in Boston. The rich fishing grounds off Cape Cod and the grand banks of Newfoundland were within easy reach. Whole townships and villages along the coast were devoted to this pursuit, the inhabitants leading a sort of dual life between the little farm at home and the sea. In later years the whale fishery became of great importance. The magnificent harbors all along the coast invited commerce. Shipbuilding grew to be a leading industry. Thus New England became, on account of its physical features like old England. Nature intended both for maritime enterprise and a manufacturing life. Both were to be sturdy intellectual centres from which was to emanate a wide-spread and dominating influence.. Literary Conditions.—(Tyler, 109-114; Richardson, I., ch. 2; Stedman, 11-26.) Among such men, in such an environment, literature was a natural product. All the conditions necessary for intellectual growth were early to be found. New England emphasized the things that Virginia neglected, and developed herself accordingly. Chief among the causes that made her, in time, a literary influence, were:
1. A Centralized Society. The people settled in groups and not, as in Virginia, on isolated plantations. ​This was brought about largely by that religious devotion that forbade families settling far from the church. Previous to 1640 many entire congregations under the leadership of their pastors came from England and established little villages, the germs of future cities. There were other reasons for centralization. It was unsafe to live far from the "block house," the common refuge in times of danger from Indians. Supplies must be obtained, not as in Virginia from boats plying upon the rivers, but from centres of trade. Thus in New England the town became in time the political unit; as the county became the unit in Virginia. Everything tended to bring men into close contact. Schools and colleges and literary culture flourish best in towns and cities where there is a constant interchange of experiences, of books, of letters and ideas.
2. Education. — It was a belief of the fathers of Now England that "one chief project of that old deluder, Satan," is to keep men in ignorance. They, therefore, regarded the educating of their children as a solemn religious duty. The settlers were mostly from the common walks of life, craftsmen and farmers, but their leaders and ministers were deeply learned men. The1636. Harvard. 1698. College of William and Mary. 1700. Yale. 1746. College of New Jersey. 1754. King's College (Now Columbia). percentage of those in New England who was even larger than it is at the present time. In the little colony of Massachusetts Bay there were ninety graduates of Cambridge and of Oxford. With such men for leaders education would ​1755. University of Pennsylvania. 1764. Brown University. 1769. Dartmouth. 1770. Rutgers. 1775. Hampden-Sidney. not languish. The school house came to be considered second only to the church in importance.
Fearing that the plantations would become, as Mather expressed it, "mere unwatered places for the devil," unless they had a university, the settlers in 1636 established a college. Four hundred pounds in money was at first pledged. Two years later, by the will of John Ilarvard, a young Charleston minister, the little college received seven or eight hundred pounds and, for those times, a large library. It is somewhat startling to think that this was only sixteen years after the Pilgrims first landed on the desolate shores of New England. Yale College came sixty-five years later. In their enthusiasm for education the colonists even tried to apply the classics to the Indian, founding Dartmouth College for that purpose in 1769.
The common school system was early established. Every town of fifty families was compelled by law to maintain a public school, and every town of one hundred families must have a school to fit pupils for Harvard College.
The Pilgrims builded better than they knew. The educational system, thus inaugurated, has become the foundation that underlies all the intellectual product of America.
3. The church was in itself an educational factor that must not be overlooked. An educated clergy, and a public sentiment that compelled every one to be ​constant attendant upon the Sabbath services, were great incentives to intellectual activity. The sermons. of the time were deep and carefully elaborated. Dealing with argumentative and doctrinal themes, they dragged their inexorable length through two and even three hours. Often the preacher gave a series of sermons on some particular topic, carefully impressing it, point by point, upon his hearers after the manner of a professor of divinity in a college. The people listened. eagerly. Mather, in his life of the Elder Winthrop, records that "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." Those with less trusty memories came to church with note books, and gathered, like a class in divinity, the important points brought out by the preacher.
The age was an argumentative one. Fierce theological battles were waging on all sides. The men of New England had taken a bold and radical step before the eyes of the world, and they held themselves ready to defend their creed with all the logic and argument at their command. Under such church discipline they gained the weapons most needed. Thus were cultivated those powers of attention, of close and consecutive reasoning, which in after years reached their fullest development in Edwards and Franklin.
Metaphysics and theological argument are not literature, yet they gave to the builders of New England an intellectuality that soon made possible purely literary work.
​Unfavorable Influences. — It must not be inferred that everything done by the Pilgrims was destined to bear rich fruit. Many influences were at work decidedly hostile to literary production, and, indeed, to any degree of symmetrical intellectual development, but fortunately the good outweighed the bad. Among these unfavorable influences only three need be mentioned.
1. Puritan Narrowness. — Hawthorne has admirably summed up this influence.
Life in the Puritan settlements "must have trudged onward with hardly anything to diversify and enliven it, while also its rigidity could not fail to cause miserable distortions of the moral nature. Such a life was sinister to the intellect and sinister to the heart; especially when one generation had bequeathed its religious gloom, and the counterfeit of its religious ardor, to the next....The sons and grandchildren of the first settlers were a race of lower and narrower souls than their progenitors had been. The latter were stern, severe, intolerant, but not superstitious, not even fanatical; and endowed, if any men of that age were, with a farseeing worldly sagacity. But it was impossible for the succeeding race to grow up, in heaven's freedom, beneath the discipline which their gloomy energy of character had established; nor, it may be, have we even yet thrown off all the unfavorable influences which, among many good ones, were bequeathed to us by our Puritan forefathers." — The Snow Image, "Main Street."
2. Lack of Æsthetic Taste. — Beauty, whether in art, literature, or external surroundings, was looked upon with suspicion. The romance and the drama were condemned as vanities; poetry, aside from hymns and religious jingles, was a mere waste of words; sculpture and painting were regarded with horror as a direct violation of the Second Commandment; while the desire for orna​ment, either in architecture or dress, was supposed to come directly from the devil.
3. Licensed Printing. — The Puritans regarded the press much as did old Governor Berkeley of Virginia. Their terror of its power to mould the public mind is half ludicrous as we view it to-day. In 1639, a press was set up in Cambridge to be watched over by the Argus eyes of the university authorities. But these guardians of the awful engine became at length too liberal, and a board of licensers was appointed to take their place. The result of this restriction upon printing was an inevitable one. The first feeble attempt at a newspaper, in 1690, died at its birth. For more than a century journalism lived as it could; historical writings were confined to a few dry journals; poetry worthy of the name was unknown. Little save sermons and controversial pamphlets issued from the press. It has been found that between the years 1706 and 1718 five hundred and fifty publications were printed in America; "of these all but eighty-four were on religious topics, and of the eighty-four, forty-nine were almanacs."
The Bay Psalm Book. (Cambridge, 1640.)
"The worst of many bad." — John Nichol.
This curious old work holds the somewhat enviable distinction of being the first book printed in America. It was the joint production of several eminent divines prominent among whom were "the apostle" Eliot and Richard Mather. The compilers put all of their tremendous energy and will power into the task of turn​ing the Psalms of David into metrical form for church use, and the result was one of the most marvellous productions ever written in English. It need not be said to one who has read even a fragment from this book that the men of early New England were anything but poetical. "Everywhere in the book," writes Tyler, "is manifest the agony it cost the writers to find two words that would rhyme,—more or less." A brief extract will characterize it better than a page of description.
Psalm CXXXVII.
The Literature of the Period falls naturally into three groups: Journals and Historical Works, Religious and Theological Writings, and Poetry.
I. HISTORICAL WORKS.
From the very first, the Pilgrims seem to have been conscious of their high destiny. They never for a moment doubted that they were the pioneers of a new era, and they realized that in future years their every act would be regarded with great interest. They therefore determined that posterity should have a truthful report of all their acts and motives.
1. Willliam Bradford (1588—1657).
"The Father of American History."
No writer of contemporary history was ever more favored by circumstances than was William Bradford, the historian of Plymouth, since theHistory of Plymouth Plantation Journal (with Winslow) greater part of the stirring scenes of which he wrote passed under his own eye. Born in Yorkshire, in 1588, he became, while yet a boy, a member of the little company of Puritans that, under the lead of their pastor, Robinson, fled to Holland. At the age of thirty-two, he was among the passengers on the Mayflower. From 1621 until his death, he was governor of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford's history is, in reality, a journal kept with extreme care. Commencing at the root of the matter, it gives a careful account of the origin of the religious dissensions in England from which the Puritan sect arose; it records the persecutions and sufferings of the ​various congregations; the flight of the little flock to Holland and thence to America, and the daily life of those first eventful years. The narrative continues down to the year 1646. It is accurate and readable, and it is almost the only authority for the period which it covers.
The manuscript has had a romantic history. It was not published, and at the death of its author it passed from hand to hand, many of the historians of the time making large extracts from it, until at length it found its way into the archives of the old South Church of Boston. After the British occupation of this church during the Revolution, it disappeared, and for almost a century it was mourned as lost. But in 1855, it was found in the library of the Bishop of London and published entire by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Required Reading.- Extracts from Bradford's History. Maynard, Merrill & Co.
2. John Winthrop (1588—1646).
Life (by Robert C. Winthrop; by Joseph II. Twitchell). As Bradford is the historian of the PlymouthHistory of New England. 1630—1646 Colony, so Winthrop is the chronicler of Massachusetts Bay. He was the first governor of the Plantation, and from 1643. until his death he was governor of the united Colonies of Massachusetts.
The first entries in Winthrop's journal were made on shipboard during the long two months' voyage to New ​England in 1630, and the entries were continued from time to time until their author's death.
These journals, by the most prominent men in the two colonies, naturally invite comparison. Bradford's work is without doubt the better of the two. It is readable, and its literary style is excellent. Winthrop's history is dull and often unreadable. It has more historical value than Bradford's, simply because the Colony of Massachusetts Bay became of more importance than the Plymouth Plantation. Winthrop delights in recording miracles, apparitions, and monstrosities. He dwells on the darker side of Puritanism, while Bradford constantly aims to display its brighter phases.
Winthrop's history has proved a rich mine for later writers. Hawthorne probably conceived of his Scarlet Letter while perusing its pages. He found in it the story of "Endicott and the Red Cross," and "The Maypole of Merry Mount." Whittier's "John Underhill" and many of Longfellow's New England Tragedies were founded on facts obtained from this old diary.
Required Reading — Whittier's "John Underhill"; Hawthorne's Endicott and the Red Cross."
3. Thomas Morton (1590—1616).
"The roistering Morton of Merry Mount." - Longfellow, "Rhyme of Sir Christopher."
Just five years after the planting of the Plymouth Colony there settled at Mount Wollaston, now Braintree, Massachusetts, one Thomas Morton, with a boisterous crew of merry fellows who on May day, 1626, ​christened the hill "Merry Mount" and held highThe New England Canaan carnival about a May-pole. The settlement soon became very offensive to its Puritan neighbors, and shortly afterward the pole was cut down by Miles Standish and his men, and Morton was sent to England. Attempting to return, he was again sent back.
Morton avenged his wrongs by writing, in England, The New England Canaan, a coarse and boisterous book, ridiculing the Puritan faith and manners. Its facts are not trustworthy, and its descriptions are grossly exaggerated. Upon the author's return to New England he was imprisoned one year for this offence. Hawthorne's May Pole of Merry Mount and Motley's Merry Mount are founded on incidents in Morton's career.
Thomas Morton of "Merry Mount" should not be confounded with Nathaniel Morton of Plymouth Colony, who published in 1669 New England's Memorial, a history of the colony from 1620 to 1646, copied largely from the history of his uncle, William Bradford, and from Winslow's Journal.
II. THEOLOGICAL WORKS.
The various theological factions that fought so fiercely throughout the Colonial era, poured into each other's ranks a leaden hail of pamphlets. The few surviving relics of these battles, with quaint, long titles, and dry-as-dust contents, are valuable now only to the historian and the antiquarian.
1. Roger Williams (1606—1683).
"An able, earnest, and successful pioneer in that great movement toward religious freedom which has characterized the history of the United States....No American ever wrote more boldly or truthfully. — Richardson.
Life (by J. O. Knowles; by Romeo Elton; by Z. A. Mudge; by R. A. Gould). Although the Puritans had dreamed of America as a land where they might worship without opposition, they never fully realized this fond ideal. Opponents sprang up all around them. The Quakers and the BaptistsThe Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, and numerous other pamphlets gave them no end of trouble. In 1630 Roger Williams, a minister of the Church of England, just turned non-conformist, settled among them and began a bitter war of argument. He was finally driven from the Colony. Thereupon with a few followers he established a settlement near what is now the city of Providence, Rhode Island.
The whole life of Roger Williams was spent in a warfare of theological debate. He defended the Baptists and the Quakers, exposed without mercy the weak points of Puritanism, and stood always on the side of truth and progress. He defended his every position with showers of pamphlets.
2. John Eliot (1604-1690).
"The Apostle to the Indians."
Although producing little that can be accounted as literature, John Eliot deserves prominent mention in ​the history of American letters. He seems to have been the only one of his generation who realized that the Indian possessed an immortal soul. He devoted his life to the task of winning these souls for Christ. Not only did he learn the Indian tongue, but he translated the entire Bible into the language. The task was a herculean one.
"To learn a language utterly unlike all other tongues, a language never written, and the strange words which seemed inexpressible by letters,—first to learn this new variety of speech, and then to translate the Bible into it, and to do it so carefully that not one idea throughout the holy book should be changed, — this was what the Apostle Eliot did." — Grandfather's Chair.
Eliot's Bible is now the most valuable relic of a vanished race. Aside from its great interest to the ethnologist and the antiquarian, it has the added interest of being the first Bible printed in America. Copies of it are exceedingly rare and costly.
Required Reading. — Hawthorne's Grandfather's Chair, Part I., Ch. 8. Eliot's Brief Narrative of the Progress of the Gospel among the Indians. 1670. Old South Leaflets.
III. POETRY.
A glance at the old Bay Psalm Book is enough to convince any one that the Puritan age was anything but a poetical one. Nevertheless we find among the early colonists many writers of verse, at least two of which were proudly classed by their contemporaries among the great poets of all time. Only these two need be considered here.
1. Anne (Dudley) Bradstreet (1612—1672).
"The Morning Star of American Poetry."
Since the days of Sappho no poetess was ever more extravagantly praised by contemporaries than was Anne Bradstreet, the "Tenth Muse" of the PuritansThe Tenth Muse, etc. Contemplations. of early New England. The daughter of Governor Thomas Dudley, she had accompanied her stern old father into the forests of Massachusetts Bay with the earliest settlers of that province. It was her happy lot to strike the first note in the grand chorus of American poetry.
In 1650 there appeared in London, with the following long-winded title, the first book of American verse ever printed abroad:
"The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America; or, General Poems, compiled with a great variety of wit and learning, full of delight; wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and description of the four elements, constitutions, ages of man, seasons of the year; together with an exact epitome of the four Monarchies, viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman; also a dialogue between old England and New concerning the late troubles; with divers other pleasant and serious poems. By a gentlewoman in those parts."
With such subjects did Anne Bradstreet woo the Muses, and her poem is just what we might expect from its title. Her numbers were seldom correct; she lacked the fine touch of the true poet, and her themes were such that not even genius could lift them into the realm of poesy, yet in spite of all this she deserves much praise, since hers was the hand that first beckoned the lyric muse to these shores.
​Among a surprising mass of rubbish from her pen there is here and there to be found a true gem. In her Contemplations, written apparently on the banks of the Merrimac at the flood tide of the year, we find the first poetry of the American landscape:
The surroundings of this early poetess were anything but inspiring. She was lame and of delicate health throughout her life. The mother of eight children, she wrote all her poems amid the hurry and care of multifarious household duties. From Anne Bradstreet has descended a sturdy literary progeny.
Holmes, Channing, R. H. Dana, Buckminster, and many other New England authors trace a lineal descent from this earliest singer of the new world.
2. Michael Wigglesworth (1631—1715).
"The Laureate of Puritanism."
None can fully appreciate the theology of early New England who has not read the remarkable poem, The God's Controversy with New England. Meat out of the Eater. The Day of Doom Day of Doom, that blazing, sulphurous picture of the punishment of the wicked according to the ideals of Puritanism. Its author, Michael Wigglesworth, in the words of Mather, "a little feeble shadow ​had come with his parents to America in his seventh year, and after a course at Harvard, had settled over a church at Malden, Massachusetts, where he at once commenced a most remarkable career as a poet. His Day of Doom, or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment, with a Short Discourse about Eternity, appearing in 1662, quickly went through nine editions in America and two in England. It became, in the words of Lowell, "the solace 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."
Judged by the cold standards of to-day the book has little poetic merit. The sing-song of the verse, that so captivated its first readers, serves to create only a passing smile, while we shudder at the narrow theology that could exult over burning infants and gloat over the moans of tortured sinners. A short extract will illustrate its metre and spirit.