CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | The Seventeenth Century | [1] |
| II. | The Earliest Verse | [17] |
| III. | The Transition to the Eighteenth Century | [27] |
| IV. | Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin | [41] |
| V. | Crèvecœur, the “American Farmer” | [59] |
| VI. | The Poetry of the Revolution and Philip Freneau | [69] |
| VII. | The Early Drama | [89] |
| VIII. | Charles Brockden Brown | [100] |
| IX. | Irving and the Knickerbocker School | [110] |
| X. | James Fenimore Cooper | [141] |
| XI. | William Cullen Bryant | [158] |
| XII. | Edgar Allan Poe | [173] |
| XIII. | The Transcendentalists | [190] |
| XIV. | Ralph Waldo Emerson | [199] |
| XV. | Henry David Thoreau | [221] |
| XVI. | Nathaniel Hawthorne | [236] |
| XVII. | John Greenleaf Whittier | [252] |
| XVIII. | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | [267] |
| XIX. | James Russell Lowell | [282] |
| XX. | Harriet Beecher Stowe | [299] |
| XXI. | Oliver Wendell Holmes | [310] |
| XXII. | Some Metropolitan Poets | [324] |
| XXIII. | The Poetry of the South | [343] |
| XXIV. | Walt Whitman | [362] |
| XXV. | The West and Mark Twain | [380] |
| XXVI. | The West in Sill and Miller | [396] |
| XXVII. | The Rise of Fiction; William Dean Howells | [411] |
| XXVIII. | Contemporary Drama | [437] |
| XXIX. | The Later Poetry | [453] |
| INDEX TO LEADING NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERIODICALS | [487] | |
| INDEX | [503] | |
A HISTORY OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE
THE COLONIAL PERIOD
CHAPTER I
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
In its beginnings American literature differs from the literatures of most other great nations; it was a transplanted thing. It sprang in a way like Minerva, full-armed from the head of Jove,—Jove in this case being England, and the armor being the heritage which the average American colonist had secured in England before he crossed the Atlantic. In contrast, Greek, Roman, French, German, English, and the other less familiar literatures can all be more or less successfully traced back to primitive conditions. Their early life was interwoven with the growth of the language and the progress of a rude civilization, and their earliest products which have come down to us were not results of authorship as we know it to-day. They were either folk poetry, composed perhaps and certainly enjoyed by the people in groups and accompanied by group singing and dancing,—like the psalms and the simpler ballads,—or they were the record of folk tradition, slowly and variously developed through generations and finally collected into a continuous story like the Iliad, the Æneid, the “Song of Roland,” the “Nibelungenlied,” and “Beowulf.” They were composed by word of mouth and not reduced to writing for years or generations, and they were not put into print until centuries after they were current in speech or transcribed by monks and scholars.