at 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.

Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements,
when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and
commerce was building up large towns, and there were wealth and
generous living and fine society, the "good old colony days when we
lived under the king," had yielded little in the way of literature that
is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the
relation of a colony to the mother country which dooms the thought and
art of the former to a hopeless provincialism. Canada and Australia
are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the {323}
thirteen colonies at the time of their separation from England. They
have cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well
equipped universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public buildings,
all the outward appliances of an advanced civilization; and yet what
have Canada and Australia contributed to British literature?

American literature had no infancy. That engaging _naivete_ and that
heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs
of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. Instead of
emerging from the twilight of the past, the first American writings
were produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age.
Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial
literature. The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge
to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on
imitating the cast off literary fashions of the mother country.
America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the
greatest names in English literature. Jamestown was planted in 160