American Literature; An Elementary Text-Book for Use in High Schools and Academies (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AMERICAN LITERATURE. COLONIAL LITERATURE. As The physical analysis of the Universe begins with protoplasm, so must intelligent study of a literature begin with examination of the inchoate material upon which the literature is based. Literature in the higher sense is a criticism of life. But the Colonial days of America were days of action, not of thought about action. The men who crossed the sea in quest The condl- of civil and religious liberty, came not to write, but to tl0115 and do. Two subjects occupied them,?the Fear of God, terof tie and the Conduct of the Colony. Such things as they beginning, wrote either told the bald story of their daily life, or discussed religion, or mingled the two. They took up the pen only in the intervals of grasping the Bible, the sword, or the plough-handle. As literature, their productions are, in almost all instances, desti- " tute of value. They are tedious, lifeless and repulsive. Yet, if you have imagination and human sympathy enough, you may detect in this protoplasmic rubbish the germs of qualities which, in their perfect development, made the genius of such men as Webster, Emerson and Hawthorne. The first American writings are not only not literature; they were not even written by Americans. There were no Tne source American born people, except the Indians, in those of our first days. American literature, then, begins with books books- written about America by foreigners. Character. Captain John Smith (1579-1631) was the first American annalist. He was a daring, restless, impetuous but shrewd man; of imagination too warm and vanity too inordinate to allow of his telling plain truth. He was more quick to magnify virtue in speech than to illustrate it by deed. But, considering how easily, in those times, he might have bec...