Mrs. Anne Bradstreet’s poems were first published in 1640, under the title of “Several Poems, compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of delight; wherein especially is contained a compleat Discourse and Description of the Four Elements, Constitutions, Ages of Man, and Seasons of the Year, together with an exact Epitome of the Three first Monarchies, viz: The Assyrian, Persian, and Grecian; and the beginning of the Roman Commonwealth to the end of their last King, with divers other pleasant and serious Poems: by a Gentlewoman of New England.”
This is not a treatise on history, and we must pass on to later days, and soon find firm ground with American-born literary men and women.
Jonathan Edwards, born at Windsor, in Connecticut, became a student at Yale College in 1716. Already, at thirteen years old, he was reading Locke on The Human Understanding, “with a keener delight than a miser feels when gathering up handfulls of silver and gold from some newly-discovered treasure.” The greatest of his many writings was “A careful and Strict Inquiry into the modern prevailing notion that Freedom of Will is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency,” and this work has been described as undoubtedly the great bulwark of Calvinistic theology. Edwards’ father had been fifty years minister of a church in America, and his ancestors first emigrated from England in Queen Elizabeth’s days; but the origin of Benjamin Franklin, to whom we come now, was much humbler.
His father, Josiah Franklin, came from England, and started in Boston as a tallow chandler. Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17th, 1706, and when ten years old his father took him home from school to cut wicks for the candles! The boy became anxious for the life of a sailor; but the father, with what now, looking back, we may call happy instinct, apprenticed Benjamin to his elder brother, James, who, just returned from a voyage to London, had, in 1717, set up a printing-press in Boston.
This change brought Benjamin at once within reach of reading, and as what is here written relates wholly to books, the following words of Benjamin Franklin, written to a son of Cotton Mather in his later years, are worth repeating: “When I was a boy, I met a book entitled Essays to do Good, which I think was written by your father. It had been so little regarded by its former possessor that several leaves of it were torn out, but the remainder gave me such a turn of thinking as to have an influence upon my conduct through life; for I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good than any other kind of reputation: and if I have been, as you seem to think, a useful citizen, the public owes all the advantage of it to that book.”
In 1724, with aid from Sir William Keith, Governor of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin came to England with the object of obtaining and bringing over a printing-press and all materials for himself; but not succeeding in this, he stayed two years in London, working at his trade, and at this time, 1725, he published A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain. This publication is not in any old collection of Franklin’s writings, and even now only one copy seems to be known.
In 1730 Benjamin founded the Public Library in Philadelphia. In 1753 he became Postmaster-General for British America. In 1743 he had originated the American Philosophical Society, and in 1749 he became the real founder of the University of Pennsylvania. The year 1752 saw the verification of his theory identifying lightning with electricity. After the Declaration of Independence Franklin was, in 1776, appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to France. In 1785 he became President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and in 1787 sat with Washington and Hamilton in the Federal Convention which framed the Constitution of the United States. On his death, on April 17th, 1790, Mirabeau announced in the General Assembly of France: “The genius which had freed America, and poured a flood of light over Europe, had returned to the bosom of the Divinity.”
Nicolas Trübner, in the interesting Introduction to his Guide to American Literature, London, 1859, points out that until 1793 no American devoted himself exclusively to literature as a profession. In this year Charles Brockden Brown’s first novel appeared. The title of this was Wieland; or, the Transformation. The author was born in Philadelphia in 1771.
The great historian William Hickling Prescott, whose grandfather, Colonel William Prescott, commanded at Bunker’s Hill, was born at Salem, in Massachusetts, in 1796. In 1814 he graduated from Harvard with honours, although in 1811, his first year at Harvard, he had lost the sight of one eye, and shortly afterwards the other eye was seriously affected in sympathy with it. This unfortunate accident was caused by a blow from a crust of bread thrown at random at a college dinner. The years from 1815 to 1817 he spent in England, “delighting not the less in the charms of nature because by him they could be seen only” as through a glass, darkly. He returned, resolved “that the ample page of knowledge, rich with the spoils of time,” if obscured to his external organs, should be no stranger to his intellectual vision.
In 1837 his first great work, The History of Ferdinand and Isabella, was finished. With inborn modesty he did not mean it to be published; but his father, Judge William Prescott, of course insisted on its publication, and soon it was published, not only in the author’s own tongue, but in Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, in the respective languages of those lands. In 1843 appeared The History of the Conquest of Mexico, and in 1847 his History of the Conquest of Peru. Next came the first volumes of the great work which Prescott was never destined to finish. In 1855 were published the two first volumes of The History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain, and in December, 1858, appeared the third volume. Early in the year he had been attacked by a slight stroke of paralysis. Early in the next year this was followed by a second, and he passed away on January 28th, 1859. In a conversation only forty-eight hours before his death he spoke of various friends, and particularly of George Ticknor, whom he described as “having shortened and brightened what, but for him, must have been many a sad and weary hour.” Asked if he was not coming to New York, he said: “No; I suppose that the days of my long journeys are over. I must content myself, like Horace, with my three houses. You know I go at the commencement of summer to my cottage by the seaside at Lynn Beach; and at autumn to my patrimonial acres at Pepperell, which have been in our family for two hundred years, to sit under the old trees I sat under when a boy; and then with winter come down to hibernate in this house. This is the only travelling, I suppose, that I shall do until I go to my long home.”