and bird and fish, and whatever vision they had of majesty or loveliness in the American landscapes. Thus we have as our fifth group of writings the books descriptive of nature in America.

6. There was still another realm of novelty in America that the people of England desired to look into the new organization of society which the altered conditions. of life in the new world compelled the English colonists to develop, their gradual innovations in politics, laws, creeds, in religious and domestic usages, the new crystallization of church and state slowly working itself clear in the English kingdom of America.

7. The several groups of writings which have been mentioned thus far, sprang in considerable measure from motives looking toward the love, or the interest, or the authority of the people of England, from whom those earliest Americans had but recently withdrawn themselves. These groups of writings, however, by no means constitute a moiety of American literature even in our first period. By far the larger portion of our writings were composed for our own people alone, and with reference to our own interests, inspirations, and needs. These include, first, sermons and other religious treatises; second, histories; and third, poetry and some examples of miscellaneous prose.

III.

Since the earliest English colonists upon these shores began to make a literature as soon as they arrived here, it follows that we can fix the exact date of the birth of American literature. It is that year 1607, when Englishmen, by transplanting themselves to America, first began to be Americans. Thus may the history of our literature be traced back from the present hour, as it recedes along the track of our national life, through the early days of the republic, through five generations of colonial existence, until, in the first decade of the seventeenth century,

it is merged in its splendid parentage-the written speech of England. And the birth-epoch of American literature was a fortunate one: it was amid the full magnificence of the Elizabethan period, whose creative vitality, whose superb fruitage, reached forward and cast their glory across the entire generation succeeding the death of Elizabeth herself. The first lispings of American literature were heard along the sands of the Chesapeake and near the gurgling tides of the James River, at the very time when the firmament of English literature was all ablaze with the light of her full-orbed and most wonderful writers, the wits, the dramatists, scholars, orators, singers, philosophers, who formed that incomparable group of titanic men gathered in London during the earlier years of the seventeenth century; when the very air of London must have been electric with the daily words of those immortals, whose casual talk upon the pavement by the street-side was a coinage of speech richer, more virile, more expressive, than has been known on this planet since the great days of Athenian poetry, eloquence, and mirth.

I find it hard to hasten past this event-the dawn upon the world of American literature and of American civilization. It is pleasant to trace in contemporaneous English literature some tokens of the interest which the English people of that day took in the romantic and perilous enterprise of laying the foundations of a new English commonwealth beyond the ocean, and of extending the domain of their own speech into lands remote and illimitable. All along during the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth attempt after attempt had been made by her indomitable subjects to get a foothold in that portion of America which she claimed as hers and which in her honor was named Virginia. All these attempts had failed, some of them tragically. In the very last year of her reign, however, a glorious old English sailor had come back to England with the great tidings that he had found it possible to make the voyage to Virginia by shooting his

ships straight to the west, thus avoiding the tedious, costly, sickly route thither by way of the West Indies. This bit of news sent a thrill of excitement through England; it was talked over at innumerable firesides; it caused a great buzz and fluttering among the merchants and bankers on the London Exchange; it was caught up and tossed about on the stage of the London theatres, which then had the function now filled by daily newspapers for the public discussion of current events. From that moment a fresh impulse was given to the interest of Englishmen in Virginia-their own vast, unpossessed, barbaric empire, now made more accessible to them, and supposed by them to be fat with gold and precious stones and all sorts of unimaginable treasures. Multitudes of Englishmen became eager to go to Virginia, even as in our own time, from the same quenchless passion for swiftly gotten wealth, we have seen men eager to go to the gold fields of California and Australia. And year by year during the early portion of the reign of James the First, the desire for a new attempt to get possession of Virginia crept up among the highest classes, and down among the lowest; and in April of the year 1606 a royal patent was conferred on certain "firm and hearty lovers" of colonization, giving them power to conduct a colony thither. Then once more the good work went forward with vigor and glee. All the summer and all the autumn of that year were spent in making ready the intended expedition. For several weeks before setting sail, the three vessels that were to carry the colonists had waited in the Thames while the managers were completing their preparations. During that time the eyes of all London were upon them; prayers for their safety were offered in the churches; and one of the mighty poets of England, Michael Drayton, poured into a noble

1 E. D. Neill, "Hist. of Va. Co. of London," vi.

2 John Marston's Works, Halliwell's ed., 1856, Vol. III., play of “ Eastward Ho."

ode the high hope, the anxiety, the ambition, the eager sympathy, with which all ranks of thoughtful and watchful Englishmen were sending the travellers out upon their great quest.

Thus far in his ode, the poet gives voice merely to the sturdy joy which by nature every Englishman has in daring adventure, in the victories of heroism, in the hope of a vast enlargement of his country's wealth and imperial sway. But this grand old Elizabethan singer could not stifle another ambition-the ambition that England might win for herself in America even nobler trophies than those of political dominion and material wealth. With the pride of an English poet and of an English man of letters, he utters in a single stanza the superb prediction of a new English literature to spring up in that far-off land. In poetic vision he then foresaw, and he hailed and greeted from afar, the unborn poets that were to rise beyond the Atlantic, and, under new constellations as he supposed, were to create a new empire of English letters: