ound to
answer all such local puzzles as this. But he is bound at least to
reflect upon them, and to demand of every local literary product
throughout this varied expanse of states: Is the root of the
"All-American" plant growing here, or is it not?

Furthermore, the critic must pursue this investigation of national
traits in our writing, not only over a wide and variegated territory,
but through a very considerable sweep of time. American literature is
often described as "callow," as the revelation of "national
inexperience," and in other similar terms. It is true that we had no
professional men of letters before Irving and that the blossoming time
of the notable New England group of writers did not come until nearly
the middle of the nineteenth century. But we have had time enough,
after all, to show what we wish to be and what we are. There have been
European books about America ever since the days of Columbus; it is
three hundred years since the first books were written in America.
Modern English prose, the language of journalism, of science, of social
intercourse, came into being only in the early eighteenth century, in
the age of Queen Anne. But Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_, a vast book
dealing with the past history of New England, was printed in 1702, only
a year later than Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_. For more than two
centuries the development of English speech and English writing on this
side of the Atlantic has kept measurable pace--now slower, now
swifter--with the speech of the mother country. When we recall the
scanty term of years within which was produced the literature of the
age of Elizabeth, it seems like special pleading to insist that America
has not yet had time to learn or recite her bookish lessons.

This is not saying that we have had a continuous or adequate
development, either of the intellectual life, or of literary
expression. There are certain periods of strong intellectual movement,
of heightened emotion, alike in the colonial epoch and since the
adoption of our present form of government, in which it is natural to
search for revelations of those qualities which we now feel to be
essential to our national character. Certain epochs of our history, in
other words, have been peculiarly "American," and have furnished the
most ideal expression of national tendencies.

If asked to select the three periods of our history which in this sense
have been most significant, most of us, I imagine, w