A History of American Literature Author:Moses Coit Tyler Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. VIRGINIA: OTHER EARLY WRITERS. I.—GeorIjc rercy of Northumberland—His worthiness—His graphic sketches of the brightness and gloom of their first... more » year in America. II.—William Strachey—His terrible voyage and wreck with Sir Thomas Gates—His book descriptive of it and of the state of the colony in Virginia—Some germs of Shakespeare's Tempest—Strachey's wonderful picture of a storm at sea. IH.—Alexander Whitaker, the devoted Christian missionary—His life and death and memory in Virginia—His appeal to England in " Good News from Virginia." IV.—John Pory—His coming to Virginia—His previous career—A cosmopolite in a colony—His return to England—His amusing sketches of Indian character—The humors and consolations of pioneer life along the James River. V.—George Sandys—His high personal qualities and his fine genius—His literary services before coming to America—Michael Drayton's exhortation to entice the Muses to Virginia—Sandys's fidelity to his literary vocation amid calamity and fatigue—His translation of Ovid—Its relation to poetry and scholarship in the new world—Passages from it—The story of Philomela—His poetic renown. In that little colony of earliest Americans, seated at Jamestown, and for more than twenty years struggling against almost every menace of destruction from without and within, were several other writers who have some claim to our notice. One of these was George Percy. Every slight glimpse we get of him through the chinks of contemporary reference tends to convince us that the uncommon respect in which he was held by his associates was rendered to him quite as much because he was a modest, brave, and honorable man, as because he was a brotherof the great Earl of Northumberland. He composed a " Discourse of the Plantations of the Souther...« less