at least colour, almost every characteristic contribution, both in verse or prose, to American literature. Even where their theology had ceased to appeal, and the light had faded out of Puritan orthodoxy, Puritan ethics and the Puritan temper still prevailed. Franklin, Emerson, and Hawthorne were as essentially the offspring of these men as William Bradford and Thomas Hooker were their representatives. When poetry awoke, and it was long before it awoke, it was their soul which suffused it. Their soul has suffused it ever since. To the influence of these silent forefathers, American poetry owes its distinguishing notes-it has them in common with the characteristic poetry of Germany-its simplicity, its purity, its wholesomeness. No American poet has ever dared, or perhaps even desired, to do what, to the shame of England and France, their poets have so often done-what is mourned by Dryden: O gracious God! how oft have we We should search in vain through the voluminous records of American song for a poem by any poet of note or merit, with one exception who is an exception in everything, glorifying animalism or blasphemy, or attempting to throw a glamour over impurity and vice. But the men to whom American poetry was indirectly to owe so much contributed, as might have been expected, nothing to its treasures. There came over with them more than one distinguished scholar, and many who either were, or were to become, theologians of eminence; men, too, full of enthusiasm for education, to whom America owes her first schools, her first libraries, her first university; but no one, with the solitary exception of George Sandys, who carried in him the seeds of poetry. Nor was the period which succeeded the establishment of the new communities more propitious to literary activity. Constant friction with England, chiefly in connection with the royal governors, constant disputes among the States about boundaries, and with the aborigines about commercial affairs— these were their occupations. Then came the coalition with Great Britain against the French and their Indian allies-a momentous crisis, culminating in the conquest of Canada and the preservation of the Colonies from subjection to France. Seven years afterwards followed the epoch-making Revolution which transformed Anglo-America from a congeries of scattered communities into a mighty nation, and which for a time effectually hushed everything except the voice of the orator, the tumult of debate, the roar of cannon, and the myriad clamour of the popular press. That story need not be told here; it is a story no Englishman will ever love to tell or to remember. To America, it was all that Marathon and Salamis were temporarily to Hellas; all that the loss of her Continental possessions was, permanently, to England. Regarded in relation to its effects, immediate and subsequent, and in relation to its examples and its lessons, it is perhaps the greatest single event in the history of mankind. That it should not have awakened the American muse seems at first sight surprising, for it opened every spring of poetic inspiration. It appealed, and appealed thrillingly, to passion, to sentiment, to imagination. In no lyric ever burned more fire than glowed in the speeches of Patrick Henry, of James Otis, of Richard Henry Lee, of Alexander Hamilton. No epic has celebrated scenes which surpass in impressiveness and picturesqueness the scenes which America witnessed between 1775 and 1782, or idealized heroes of nobler and grander moral temper than most of those who shaped the destinies of the Western World at that tremendous crisis. Still lyric, still epic, still poetry in every form of its genuine expression, slept. But, if we reflect, this need not surprise us. Wordsworth has admirably defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity. As men who make history seldom write it, so, when poetry is expressing itself in action, it has little need to express itself in words. The achievements and character of those who welded America into a nation were of a piece with all that had originally fashioned, moulded and preserved the several communities now federated. Both were works to which every citizen contributed, and in which every citizen took absorbing interest. As a rule, the Puritan despised poetry, even when he had leisure for it. Hymns and Biblical paraphrases, indeed, he tolerated, patronized, and, if he had the ability, produced; but when it went beyond these it became vanity, and his sympathy with it ceased. What need of poetry to inspire, when the voice of Duty, when the voice of God Himself, was calling? Of what worth the tribute of song to "live battle odes, whose lines were steel and fire"; the homage of mere aesthetic appreciation to virtues so practical, to achievements so real? But there was another reason, and perhaps the chief one, for the silence of song. The triumph of the warrior and of the statesman could have seemed no triumph to the poet. To him England was all that Athens, all that Rome, had been to his brethren in ancient times, the object of his profoundest reverence, of his fondest affection, the consecrated home of the lords of his art, and fraught with memories inexpressibly dear. Before, an exile, he was now an alien. Nothing, then, can be more natural than that this revolution should have failed to awaken poetry. The poetry which the Revolution could not inspire was not likely to be inspired by the period which immediately succeeded. The history of America between 1782 and 1820 is the history of the most distracted time in her annals. All was fever, all was tumult. The old world was passing away, the new world had not defined itself. While the fierce conflicts between Federalists and Democrats tore and perplexed her central councils, dividing the whole Republic into hostile camps, feuds and disputes peculiar to themselves kept the separate States in constant turmoil. The alliance against England, instead of conducing to permanent harmony, seemed only to have the effect of aggravating their differences. To all these distractions were added the distractions involved by America's association with that mighty European revolution, the torch of which had been lighted by her own; by the relations with Napoleon, by the second war with Great Britain. The termination of that war in 1814 marks no epoch in American history, but it ushered in the period which witnessed the birth of her Poetry, not in the historical-for she had already produced much-but in the true sense of the term. Nothing more deplorable than the verses which have come down to us from the earliest colonists and from the ante-Revolutionary age could be conceived. They consist chiefly of paraphrases of the Psalms, such as find expression in such doggerel as the Bay Psalm-Book, of descriptive poems and of miscellaneous trifles of a serious cast, and were the work, generally speaking, of Puritan divines, schoolmasters, and scribbling governors. They may be dismissed without ceremony; for to settle the relative proportion of worthlessness between Benjamin Thomson, "punning" Byles, Michael Wigglesworth, who, "when unable to preach by an affection of the lungs, In costly verse and most laborious rhymes Did dish up truths right worthy our regard," Nathaniel Evans and Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, the "mirror of her age," as, unhappily, in poetry she was, would indeed be a futile task. A little later we find a group of versifiers who, in their several ways, almost rise to the dignity of mediocrity. Such would be John Trumbull, who began his career with a poem bearing the ominous title of the Progress of Dulness, but whose McFingal is a very respectable imitation of Hudibras, containing original touches not unworthy of its model. Timothy Dwight, who, |