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CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1607-1765 . . . . . . . . . 321 II. THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD, 1765-1815 . . . . . . 365 III. THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION, 1815-1837 . . . . 400 IV. THE CONCORD WRITERS, 1837-1861 . . . . . . . . . 434 V. THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS, 1837-1861 . . . . . . . 472 VI. LITERATURE IN THE CITIES, 1837-1861 . . . . . . 511 VII. LITERATURE SINCE 1861 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554 VIII. THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN AMERICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
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OUTLINE SKETCH OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.
CHAPTER I.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD.
1607-1765.
The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as history than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the intellectual vigor of the English colonists in America by the books that they wrote; those "stern men with empires in their brains" had more pressing work to do than the making of books. The first settlers, indeed, were brought face to face with strange and exciting conditions—the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and fauna of a new world—things which seem stimulating to the imagination, and incidents and experiences which might have lent themselves easily to poetry or romance. Of all these they wrote back to England reports which were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon the whole, hardly rise into the region of literature. "New England," said Hawthorne, "was then in a {322} state incomparably more picturesque than at present." But to a contemporary that old New England of the seventeenth century doubtless seemed any thing but picturesque, filled with grim, hard, worky-day realities. The planters both of Virginia and Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and starvation, constantly threatened by Indian wars, and troubled by quarrels among themselves and fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles between the royal governors and the House of Burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the theological squabbles in New England, which fill our colonial records, are petty and wearisome to read of. At least, they would be so did we not bear in mind to what imperial destinies these conflicts were slowly educating the little communities which had hardly as yet secured a foothold on the edge of the raw continent.