The answer to this question was of vital importance. Upon it depended our destiny in literature. It came clear and strong. To go elsewhere were to imitate the discontented and foolish farmer who became possessed of a passion for hunting diamonds, and, selling his farm for a song, spent his days in wandering over the earth in search of them. The man who bought this farm found diamonds in the yard around the house, and developed that farm into the famous Golconda mines. The poor man who wandered away had acres of diamonds at home. They were his if he had but been wise enough to gather them.
So was America a rich field for her authors. Nature nowhere else offered such inspiration to the poet, the descriptive and the scientific writer as was found in America. Its mountains were the grandest; its plains the broadest; its rivers the longest; its lakes were inland seas; its water-falls were the most sublime; its caves were the largest and most wonderful in the world; its forests bore every variety of vegetable life and stretched themselves from ocean to ocean; it had a soil and a climate diversified and varied beyond that of any other nation; birds sang for us whose notes were heard on no other shores; we had a fauna and a flora of our own. For the historian there was the aboriginal red man, with his unwritten past preserved only in tradition awaiting the pen of the faithful chronicler; the Colonial period was a study fraught with American life and tradition and no foreigner could gather its true story from the musty tomes of a European library; the Revolutionary period must be recorded by an American historian. For the novelist and the sketch writer our magnificent land had a rich legendary lore, and a peculiarity of manners and customs possessed by no other continent. The story of its frontier, with a peculiar type of life found nowhere else, was all its own.
It was to this magnificent prospect, with its inspiring possibilities that Progress,—the first child of liberty—stood and pointed as she awoke the slumbering genius of independent American Authorship, and, placing the pen in her hand bade her write what she would. Thus the youngest aspirant in literature stood forth with the freest hand, in a country with its treasures of the past unused, and a prospective view of the most magnificent future of the nations of earth.
What a field for literature! What an opportunity it offered! How well it has been occupied, how attractive the personality, how high the aims, and how admirable the methods of those who have done so, it is the province of this volume to demonstrate. With this end in view, the volume has been prepared. It has been inspired by a patriotic pride in the wonderful achievement of our men and women in literature, in making America, at the beginning of her second century as a nation, the fair and powerful rival of England and Continental Europe in the field of letters.
Wonderful have been the achievements of Americans as inventors, mechanics, merchants—indeed, in every field in which they have contended—but we are prepared to agree with Dr. Johnson that “The chief glory of a nation is its authors;” and, with Carlyle, that they entitle us to our greatest respect among other nations. The reading of the biographies and extracts herein contained should impress the reader with the debt of gratitude we as a people owe to those illustrious men and women, who, while wreathing their own brows with chaplets of fame, have written the name, “America,” high up on the literary roll of honor among the greatest nations of the world.
The Poets of New England
THE DISTINCTIVE PURPOSE AND PLAN OF THIS VOLUME.
