Thus far in this book you have been reading in verse, in prose, and in the form of drama, stories that are complete in themselves and that have been written by English and American authors at various times during the last three centuries.

Now that you think back over all that you have read, you see that besides the pleasure you get from reading a good story, the story often makes real to you some period about which you study in your history. As You Like It helps you to realize the England of the sixteenth century, so that when you read about Queen Elizabeth and Philip Sidney and Walter Raleigh and the Great Armada, these names and events are not merely names and events to you, but helps by which you extend your own experience back into those colorful times. So it is with Quentin Durward or with "The Prisoner of Chillon." "Drowne's Wooden Image" is a bit of life in colonial New England, "Atalanta's Race" a bit of life in old Greece, Silas Marner a bit of life in a village when weaving was done by individual workers, not in great mills. We might read a group of stories about ancient Greece or the Age of Chivalry or Colonial New England and thus come to understand more picturesquely, more vividly, our history of Grecce or medieval England or early America.

Some such opportunity is now to be given you. The setting, as they say in dramas, is America; the time is our whole history, from the settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth to this present day; the persons in the drama are our countrymen, while the life that is to be revealed is our national life. It is to be the story of our literature. Its purpose is to make

more vivid and real to you what America

means.

This study will be a supplement to your study of our history. We do not understand America merely by knowing the names of the presidents, the method of government, the growth of population and wealth, the facts about its wars. Understanding is deeper than knowing. All that America has meant in the past, all that America means in the present, the ideals that have grown up here, that have been tested in battle and lived in times of peace-the depth and quality of your understanding of these things will determine what America means for you. So it comes about that quite apart from the pleasure or the interest that you find in some poem or story in itself there is a way in which that poem or story, and the story of its author's life, may help to deepen your idea of the meaning of America. The Story of American Literature is a great and interesting story, made up of many parts, and supplementing and enriching what you read in your history of the United States.

It is true that many of the poems, stories, novels, that have been written in America are such as might have been written in England or in another language in one of the other countries of Europe. But our literature, like the literature of every nation, in the large reflects the development of national life and ideals. It is the expression of our political, social, and industrial life, of our ideas of beauty and art, and of our interpretation of Nature. Therefore our story will follow the main divisions or epochs into which American history is divided. The writings that be

long to the period from the first settlements to the close of the Revolution may be considered under the headingFOUNDING THE NATION. These writings consist of chronicles and letters about travel, diaries, discussions of religious freedom, and, later, of the first attempts to write imaginative poetry and prose and to express the new ideals that sprang out of the contest with England.

The second period was one of definition. After the constitution was adopted and Washington became the first president, much remained to be done. The colonies had been united by the common defense against England's tyranny; after the victory, they had set up a form of constitutional government; but they were not yet a united nation. The territorial expansion (the addition of Florida and the Louisiana Territory and the beginnings of western colonization); the enormous growth in population (from about five millions in 1800 to about seventeen millions in 1840); the experience gained through foreign relations (with England, France, and the Barbary states); and American sympathy with the struggle of the South American states for independence (crystallized in the Monroe Doctrine)—all these forces helped to define America, to make people think as Americans. This process of definition and unification is reflected in the writings of the period: in the stories of Cooper and Irving, in the poetry of Bryant, in the great orations of Webster (at Bunker Hill in 1825 and on the one hundredth birthday of Washington in 1832); and, finally, in a notable address by Emerson in 1837, which has been called our intellectual declaration of independence. This second period of our story, therefore, may be called the period of definition-DEFINING THE NATION.

With the third period, which began about 1840, we reach a time of great creative activity. The continued growth of the nation in population and wealth, the increasing intensity of the great debate on the relation of the states to the central government, a debate that required a terrible war to settle-these gave meaning to the years that completed the

first century after the Declaration of Independence. Great interpreters arose: statesmen like Lincoln; poets like Whittier and Longfellow and Lowell; teachers and thinkers like Emerson. It was a period of interpretation, a period in which certain American ideals and characteristics were seen more clearly than ever before. The field of literature, too, expanded from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Besides discussions of public questions, philosophy, and poetry of a national type, the literature of pure art found embodiment in song and story-the work of Poe, of Hawthorne, of scores of lesser men South and East and West. We call this third period the period of interpretation-INTERPRETING THE NATION.

Since 1870 the process of expansion, of finding new territories, has gone on apace. New frontiers have been established in American life. This refers not only to the westward expansion of the nation, the conquest of the great territories west of the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, the repetition, over and over again, of the pioneering that had begun with the first settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts, but also to an expansion in the range and growth in the individuality of our literature. This process is at work today. It is making the literature of today more significant, perhaps, than any that has preceded. This story of development we have treated under the headings, NEW FRONTIERS, and TENDENCIES OF TODAY.

You come to the reading of this story with a mind already prepared by much of your previous reading. You know something about the careers of many of the great writers of America, and you have read many of their works. The story will draw upon this knowledge and will seek to bring it into the new relations that you will need to keep in mind if your knowledge is to be of the greatest use. The study topics will also enable you to connect what you have previously read with the additional selections given here, so that the Story of American Literature will become not only part of your mental equipment but will help to make you a better citizen.

Like the nation itself, American Literature has grown from very small beginnings. The pioneers who left English homes in the seventeenth century to brave the dangers of the Atlantic in their little ships did not think of themselves as the forerunners of a mighty and independent nation. They did this thing in obedience to two great impulses. The first was the love of adventure. They were driven by that great hunger for travel and exploration that had made the reign of Queen Elizabeth so glorious. Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the heroes of the victory over the Spanish Armada, planned the first expeditions to colonize the territory of Virginia. His attempts to found a permanent colony on what is now the coast of North Carolina did not succeed, but these first ships were followed, a few years later, by others that bore to Virginia the settlers of Jamestown. The exploits of the great Elizabethan seamen, Drake, Raleigh, the Cabots, and many others, fired the imaginations of men who wished to follow in search of like adventures. Early settlers were called "adventurers." They were like the pioneers who were later to push on across the Alleghanies, across the Mississippi Valley and the western plains to the Golden Gate, seeking new opportunities for life and happiness in lands not previously occupied by men of the English race.

As the impulse which settled Jamestown and the southern colonies and later led men to push westward to the Pacific was derived from this desire for adventure, a pursuit of the ideal that you have already found expressed in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses, so a second impulse, even deeper in its intensity, led to the founding of New England. This impulse was the desire for religious and political liberty. New England was founded by men and

women who despaired of gaining this freedom in the mother country. They had no thought of return. "Farewell, dear England," we read; "our hearts shall be fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare, when we shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness." And in another place we find the words: "We are well weaned from the delicate milk of the mother country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange land. The people are industrious and frugal. It is not with us as with men whom small things can discourage.' Before the Mayflower landed, the voyagers held a meeting in the little cabin and drew up a "Compact," the first instrument of self-government adopted in America, in which "in the presence of God and of one another" they agreed to form "a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation . . . and by virtue whereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws . . . ... as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."

These, then, were the motives that led to the colonization of America: the search for adventure, and the search for religious and political freedom. The first of these motives was more active in Virginia and the South; the second appeared at the very beginning of the colonization of New England. As time went on, these geographical distinctions merged. Virginia, as you know, had a very active part in the events that led to the break with England. The first battles-Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill-were fought in Massachusetts; but Patrick Henry, the orator whose fiery eloquence stirred men with the great hope of freedom, George Washington, the commander of the armies and the first president of the new nation, and Thomas

Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, were all Virginians. And the pioneer spirit of adventure, tinged with romance in Captain John Smith and his Jamestown companions, marked by religious fervor and deep seriousness in the men and women of the Mayflower, blends into that great passion for the conquest of the western territories that became the strongest factor in the conversion of the thirteen widely separated colonies into a single nation.

You see, by now, that these colonists, south and north, were men of action, not dreamers. They had small time for writing. What they wrote was generally in the form of diaries, letters, accounts of travel, histories of their colonies. Most of it is not literature; it is the source of much of our first-hand information as to manner of life, ideals, and the progress of the colonies from rude beginnings to groups of self-governing communities. It is also the raw material which later writers have often converted into the pure gold of literature. This you will see if you will recall some of Hawthorne's tales, such as "Endicott and the Red Cross," "The Gray Champion," or "Drowne's Wooden Image"; some of Irving's sketches, such as "Philip of Pokanoket" or the story of Wouter van Twiller; some of Bryant's poems, like the "Song of Marion's Men," or Longfellow's poems, such as "Miles Standish," "Paul Revere," and "Evangeline." Indeed, one reason for reading some of these early writings is that you may be able to reconstruct in your imagination the life with which later poets and tellers of tales have had to deal. To this end, we shall notice a few of these early writers and their works.

Literature in the South. The fact has already been noted that the men who first colonized Virginia were seekers for adventure, men of action who wished to make a fortune and return to England. They had no impulse to write in defense of the great principles of religious and political liberty. Often they were men of education, like George Sandys, treasurer of the colony from 1621 to 1624, who spent his leisure in translating Ovid from Latin into English. As time went on,

the plantation system became as characteristic of the South as the town was characteristic of New England. But men who live on plantations, far removed from neighbors, miss the contact of mind with mind, the contagion of ideas, that the towns of New England encouraged. There was small interest in education; the government discouraged the establishment of printing presses. Up to the time of the Revolution, therefore, but little writing of permanent value was done in the South. The exceptions are in the writings of John Smith, William Strachey, and William Byrd.

Captain John Smith (1580-1631). The life of John Smith, an adventurer and soldier of fortune, was itself a romance as thrilling as any that can be found in fiction. The son of a tenant farmer in England, he ran away at fifteen, fought in the Netherlands, in Hungary, and in the wars with Turkey; was captured by the Turks, escaped to Russia, and returned to England in 1606, ready to accompany the adventurers who were to establish the first permanent English settlement in America. He was exactly the kind of man to be of service in such an expedition. He showed remarkable ability in dealing with the Indians, in exploring the country, in foraging for supplies, in defending the settlement. In 1608 he became president of Virginia, but returned to England in the following year. Before this he had written and sent home for publication an account of the venture, which appeared in 1608 under the title A True Relation of Such Occurrences of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia. A few years later he returned to America, and explored the New England coast. In 1615 he was a member of an expedition which planned to establish a colony in New England, but the ship was captured by French pirates and Smith became a prisoner. After his escape he returned to England and devoted most of his time to the writing of his adventures.

A True Relation was written in the brief intervals of the crowded days when Smith was consolidating the struggling Jamestown settlements. Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that he could not practice grace of style, finish of phrasing,

artistic balance of incidents. The marvel is that such scribbled jottings should have so much vividness and charm. He wrote with his eye clearly upon what he was describing, with his mind stored with recent happenings. Several years after his return he wrote a General History of Virginia, in which he told the famous story of Pocahontas. In subsequent years this Indian princess, who had saved the life of the brave adventurer, married an Englishman, visited London, was presented at court, and became a nine days' wonder.

In his numerous writings, Smith's purpose was to tell the story of his adventures, and this he did with an exaggeration perhaps pardonable in a man who had lived amid thrilling scenes. He also sought to interest people in coming to America to live. The people he addressed were not pilgrims fleeing to a new country in search of religious liberty; neither were they adventurers. He hoped to open a way by which mechanics, farmers, young men and women who had no opportunity because of poverty, might find new homes. He laid down sensible rules for the management of the colony, and he wrote the first history of the first English colony in America.

These three characteristics of his work, then, should be remembered: his stories of adventure, of which the account of his relations to Powhatan and Pocahontas is perhaps the best; his efforts to increase colonization as an opportunity for interesting and profitable living; and his practical suggestions on government, together with the history of Virginia in which they are placed.

Of the first of these features no illustrations need be given here; you are already familiar with the story of Pocahontas. Of the second the following paragraphs will serve as an example:

What pleasure can be more than (being tired with any occasion ashore in planting vines, fruits, or herbs, in contriving their own grounds, to the pleasure of their own minds, their fields, gardens, orchards, buildings, ships, and other works) to recreate themselves before their own doors, in their own boats upon the seas, where man, woman, and child, with a small hook and line, by angling, may take diverse sorts of ex

cellent fish, at their pleasure? And is it not pretty sport, to pull up two pence, six pence, and twelve pence, as fast as you can hale and vear a line? . . And what sport doth

yield a more pleasing content, and less hurt or charge than angling with a hook, and crossing the sweet air from isle to isle, over the silent streams of a calm sea? Wherein the most curious may find pleasure, profit, and content. My purpose is not to persuade children from their parents, men from their wives, nor servants from their masters; only, such as with free consent may be spared; but that each parish, or village, in city or country, that will but apparel their fatherless children of thirteen or fourteen years of age, or young married people that have small wealth to live on, here by their labor may live exceeding well.

Who can desire more content, that hath small means, or but only his merit to advance his fortune, than to tread and plant that ground he hath purchased by the hazard of his life? If he have but the taste of virtue and magnanimity, what to such a mind can be more pleasant than planting and building a foundation to his posterity, got from the rude earth, by God's blessing and his own industry, without prejudice to any? If he have any grain of faith or zeal in Religion, what can he do less hurtful to any, or more agreeable to God, than to seek to con'vert those poor savages to know Christ, and humanity, whose labors with discretion will triple requite thy charge and pains? What so truly suits with honor and honesty as the discovering things unknown, erecting towns, peopling countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching virtue, and gain to our native mother country a kingdom to attend her; find employment for those that are idle because they know not what to do; so far from wronging any as to cause posterity to remember thee, and remembering thee, ever honor that remembrance with praise?

Of the third phase of his work no detailed illustration can be given here. You will remember the famous rule established by Captain Smith for the colonists, to the effect that if men would not work, neither should they eat. In the tract called A Description of New England (1616) from which the paragraphs just quoted have been taken, there is a discussion of the characteristics of the true leader in colonial enterprise. Some sentences from it may be given here, and with them we take leave of this first interpreter of life in colonial Virginia.