Book farm 7-27-45 PREFACE. THE retrospective turn given to American thought by the celebrations of the Centennial year, has stimulated an interest in the history of our literature. Mr. W. J. Linton's Poetry of America* and Mr. Charles F. Richardson's Primer of American Literature are perhaps symptomatic of this. Prof. M. C. Tyler's History of American Literature, long announced, is now also said to be forthcoming-at least the first part of it. The aim of the present volume is to give a series of selections from some forty or fifty authors no longer living, illustrative of the growth of American literature from 1776 to 1876. It is designed to represent only polite literature in the narrow sense; poetry, fiction, humor, satire, sketches of life and character. History, biography, travel, oratory, and, in general, what Coleridge has called "the literature of knowledge," are excluded. In the short notices prefixed to the selections, no attempt has been made at a bibliography. Where the * London: George Bell & Sons, 1878. + Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co., 1878. date of a publication is mentioned, it occurs merely as an incident in the writer's life. The large collections of Kettell, Griswold, and Duyckinck have given valuable aid in the preparation of the book; but I have “gone behind the returns" in all but a few instances, where the original works were not accessible to me. My thanks are due to the publishers who have kindly allowed me the use of copyrighted matter. NEW HAVEN, November, 1878. HENRY A. BEERS. INTRODUCTION. THE COLONIAL PERIOD. THE literature of the American Colonies contains much of historical interest, little of purely artistic worth. The center of intellectual activity then, as later, was New England. The leaders of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay plantations were mainly clergymen, many of them graduates of Cambridge. Literature in England had taken a strong theological bias since the accession of James in 1603; and considering our forefathers' calling and errand into this wilderness, it is not surprising that New England's chief literary staples were sermons and controversial pamphlets. John Higginson, of Salem, in his eloquent "Attestation" to Cotton Mather's Magnalia, describes Mather-born in 1663-as a minister of the third generation. Mather himself tells us that those who guided the Puritan Exodus came as middle-aged men, bringing children with them, whose earliest recollections would still be of England or Holland; so that only the grandchildren of the original settlers were born on New English soil, and the third generation were the first Americans. The first generation indeed, and, in a sense, the second, remained Englishmen, and never grew at home in the new country. After V 1642, the colonists came into intimate relations with the party in power in England: many returned from their exile, and there was constant passing to and fro between Old and New England. Hugh Peters, for example, went back for life in 1641, and Nathaniel Ward, the author of the Simple Cobbler of Agawam, in 1647. This state of things lasted until the Restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, when the New England settlers found themselves once more out of sympathy with the home government. Americans after this were provincials rather than colonists, if such a distinction may be admitted. The literature of a colony is always imitative, and is usually distinguished from that of the mother country only by being worse than its model. If we look into American writings of the seventeenth century, we are reminded that Bradford, Winthrop, Cotton, Hooker, and Davenport were the contemporaries of Sylvester Donne, Phineas Fletcher, Quarles, Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. The Puritan divines of New England who gave a loose rein to their muse, exhibit the same crabbed learning and quaint conceit which marked in England the decay of a literary era. They wrote psalms in the manner of Sternhold and Hopkins; satires and divine poems after the style of Donne; riddles and anagrams which recall the emblems of Quarles, and epitaphs that smack of Cowley. There is no recognition in their verses of their own changed conditions, as offering fresh themes for poetry. The mysterious forest held for them no beautiful suggestions: it was merely a grim and hideous wilderness peopled by heathen "salvages," who were of interest to them only as bloodthirsty enemies or as devilworshipers to be converted out of hand. With a stub |