odwin and Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. for the
passages from Bryant; to Messrs. A. O. Armstrong & Son for the
selections from Poe; to the Rev. E. E. Hale and Messrs. Roberts
Brothers for the extract from _The Man Without a Country_; to Walt
Whitman for his two poems; and to Mr. Clemens and the American
Publishing Co. for the passage from _The Jumping Frog_.

HENRY A. BEERS.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1607-1765

CHAPTER II.
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD, 1765-1815

CHAPTER III.
THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION, 1815-1837

CHAPTER IV.
THE CONCORD WRITERS, 1837-1861

CHAPTER V.
THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS, 1837-1861

CHAPTER VI.
LITERATURE IN THE CITIES, 1837-1861

CHAPTER VII.
LITERATURE SINCE 1861

APPENDIX.

INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS.

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 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, work-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 those conflicts were slowly
educating the l