Bliss Perry...

The United States of America has been from the beginning in a perpetual change. The physical and mental restlessness of the American and the temporary nature of many of his arrangements are largely due to the experimental character of the exploration and development of this continent. The new energies released by the settlement of the colonies were indeed guided by stern determination, wise forethought, and inventive skill; but no One has ever really known the outcome of the experiment. It is a

The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of records of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters written from California in 1849 to the “Folks back East.”Addressed to home-keeping Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new world, explain the present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the future. Captain John Smith's True Relation, already alluded to, is the typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager energy, of

When the Eighteenth century opened, many signs of change were in the air. The Third generation of native-born Americans was becoming secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In the height of the tragic folly over the supposed “Witchcraft” in Salem, Increase Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in their implacable work. But before Five years had passed, Judge Sewall does public penance in church for his share of the awful blunder, desiring “To take the shame

If we turn, however, to the literature produced in America between the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, we perceive that it is a literature of discord and passion. Its spirit is not that of “One united people.”Washington could indeed declare in his Farewell address of 1796, “With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles” ; yet no One knew better than Washington upon what a slender thread this

The Fourth of July orator for 1826 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was Edward Everett. Although only Thirty-two he was already a distinguished speaker. In the course of his oration he apostrophized John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as venerable survivors of that momentous day, Fifty years earlier, which had witnessed our Declaration of Independence. But even as Everett was speaking, the aged author of the Declaration breathed his last at Monticello, and in the afternoon of that same day Adams died al

To understand the literary leadership of New England during the Thirty years immediately preceding the Civil War it is necessary to recall the characteristics of a somewhat isolated and peculiar people. The mental and moral traits of the New England colonists, already glanced at in an earlier chapter, had suffered little essential modification in Two hundred years. The original racial stock was still dominant. As compared with the middle and southern colonies, there was relatively little immigra

Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that great generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other men— romancers, poets, essayists, historians— who shared in the intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely artists in prose and verse than they were seekers after the unattainable. Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at Brook Farm with some of the most extreme types of transcendental extravagance. The movement interested him artistically and

Enter now Two egotists, who have little in common save their egotism, Two outsiders who upset most of the conventional American rules for winning the literary race, Two men of genius, in short, about whom we are still quarreling, and whose distinctive quality is more accurately perceived in Europe than it has ever been in the United States. Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both shared in the tradition and influence of European Romanticism. But they were also late comers, an

“There is what I call the American idea,” declared Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. “This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracythat is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government on the principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom.” These are noble words, and they are thought to have suggested a familiar phrase of Lincoln's Gett

The changes that have come over the inner spirit and the outward expression of American life since Lincoln's day are enough to startle the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have been accomplished within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The author of One of the many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was William Dean Howells, then an Ohio journalist of Twenty-three. In 1917, at the age of Eighty, Mr. Howells is still adding to his long row of charming and memorable books. E

An authoritative account of American Literature to the close of the Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler's History of American literature during the colonial time, 2 volumes (1878) and Literary history of the American Revolution, 2 volumes (1897). For a general survey see Barrett Wendell, A literary history of America (1900), W. P. Trent, American literature (1903), G. E. Woodberry, America in literature (1903), W. C. Bronson, A short history of American literature (1903), with an excellent biblio