Search -
A History of American Literature During the Colonial Time ...: 1607-1676. (v. 1)
A History of American Literature During the Colonial Time 1607-1676 - v. 1 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 I. THE BEGINNING. I.—The Procession of the first English-speaking colonies from the old world to the new—Our first literary period that of the plan... more »ting of the American nation—Our first American writers immigrant Americans—True Fathers of American Literature—The literary traits they brought with them. II.—Why those first Americans wrote books—True classification of early American writings—Tidings sent back—Controversial appeals—Defences against calumny—Descriptions of the new lands—And of the new life there—Books of religion—Poetry—Histories—Miscellaneous prose. III.—Birth year of American literature—State of English literature when American literature was born—Interest of Englishmen then in their barbaric American empire—Departure from England of the first English Americans—Michael Drayton's farewell ode to them. There is but one thing more interesting than the intellectual history of a man, and that is the intellectual history of a nation. The American people, starting into life in the early part of the seventeenth century, have been busy ever since in recording their intellectual history in laws, manners, institutions, in battles with man and beast and nature, in highways, excavations, edifices, in pictures, in statues, in written words. It is in written words that this people, from the very beginning, have made the most confidential and explicit record of their minds. It is in these written words, therefore, that we shall now search for that record. We need to picture to ourselves the outgoing of the several English colonies which made their way hither in our earliest time, joining that long, grim, many-tongued procession which during all that era pushed westward from Europe toward this hemisphere. Between the year 1607, when Virginia, the first of the...« less