Miller, on the other, has so predominated over the impression made by the true masters of American song, that work as little representative of what is best in American poetry as it is of what is best in our own poetry has come to be regarded as essentially typical. And so it is, and from these causes chiefly, that England, as a nation, has not done justice to American poetry.

To a survey of that poetry, a brief sketch of its origin and early history is a necessary prelude; for its characteristics are to be traced to conditions and circumstances long preceding its articulate expression. Schiller, in a famous lyric, has described the austerities amid which the German muse was cradled and nurtured, and attributed its lofty spirit to their severe discipline; but austerities sterner still tempered the infancy of the American muse.

In the zenith of our own Golden Age of poetry and letters, when Shakespeare had just finished King Lear and Bacon was meditating the Instauratio Magna, the first pioneers of American civilization landed at Jamestown. Michael Drayton in a hearty and spirited ode had bade them Godspeed, and blended with his blessing a prophecy that the New World would not be without its bards. But upwards of a hundred and sixty years were to pass before that prophecy was even partially to be fulfilled. During those years, it would be scarcely possible to conceive conditions more unpropitious to the production of poetry, or more propitious to the development of those heroic virtues which poetry loves to celebrate, and of that "character," as Emerson calls it, which is the noblest substratum of poetry itself. The frag

ment of Percy, and the narratives of Captain John Smith and of William Strachey, record the storm and stress of the early part of this period, the period which witnessed the settlement of Virginia. Then came the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, and, amid hardships unspeakable, preceding and ensuing, the foundation of New Plymouth. With the foundation of Massachusetts which followed, began the history of all that is implied and involved in the establishment and constitution of New England. In the South, also, there had been the same activity. The colonization of Virginia had been succeeded by the foundation of Maryland and the two Carolinas. Round the Delaware, New York, and Chesapeake Bays, the Middle States had been gradually formed. All this had been a work of Herculean labour, absorbing every energy, and taxing to the uttermost man's powers of effort and endurance. Forests had to be cleared; marshes to be drained; the savage aborigines to be kept at bay. Carrying their lives in their hands, inured to privation and distress in their severest forms, these hardy and dauntless adventurers lived daily face to face with the grimmest realities of life. The toil of the pioneer accomplished, other toils not less arduous and incessant awaited them in the duties incumbent on the citizens of infant States, the duties of the builder, the agriculturist, the legislator. Then came the wars with the Indians. Incessantly harassed by the raids of these murderous enemies, always on the watch for mischief and assassination, in 1637 they brought the first of these wars to a climax, by the annihilation of the Pequots, men, women and children, a scene of almost unparalleled

horror.' Still more terrible was the second war in 1674, which lasted two years, and in which Massachusetts was overrun by the savages, some eighty towns raided, some twelve totally destroyed, and ten in every hundred of the men of military age either killed outright, or dragged off to a death of agony by torture. Nothing in history is more thrilling than some of the contemporary narratives which place us in the midst of these frightful experiences of the Fathers of Virginia and of New England.

2

In this iron school was tempered the character of the forefathers of those who were to create American literature. Nor must we forget who these men originally were. However mixed was the population of the States in the South and of the middle group, the founders of New England were almost entirely what that name implies-Englishmen: but they were Englishmen of a peculiar type. The first emigrants had quitted Europe because of their dissatisfaction with the regulations and ritual of the Established Church. The successive emigrants between 1630 and 1640 consisted of those who, despairing of the cause of religious and civil liberty under Charles I, had left the Mother Country in impatient indignation, to realize what they desired in a community of their own founding. In spite of many differences of opinion, these men, like their brother Puritans in England, had a common character. In their religious convictions enthusiasts and fanatics, with the Bible and the Bible only as their guide and rule,

1 See Street's spirited poem, The Settler, Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America, pp. 399-410.

? See Dwight's poem. Ibid., pp. 14-17.

they sought in its precepts and in its examples all that they desired to learn and all that they aspired to become. Almost everything they did, almost everything they meditated, took its ply and its colour from this enthusiasm. But the gracious philanthropy of the New Testament appealed to them far less than the sterner teachings of the Old. Here they found justification for the fierce intolerance which, in their uncompromising creed, ranked with the cardinal virtues, for the rancour with which they regarded the enemies of God, and for the many ruthless deeds which were, no doubt, forced upon them, but which appear to have cost them so little compunction. And here, too, they found the patterns on which their lives were fashioned, individually as well as collectively. Never since the days of the Patriarchs did men live, in a sense so literally true, "as ever in their great Task-master's eye," or find such sustainment in the sense of duty fulfilled, and in simple faith.

To enter their homes is recalling the world of the Chosen People. Each busy day, each frugal meal, opened and closed with prayer. Next to God, in a child's eyes, stood his parents, and next to his parents, his elders. Frivolity, irreverence were almost unknown, and anything approaching to their expression, either in word or act, was set down with a severity strangely out of proportion to the offence. To be abstemious and chaste, to speak the truth at any cost and under any stress, to regard the world's gauds and the world's honours with contempt, to be patient in tribulation and sober in prosperity, to recognize in conscience the veritable voice of the Al

mighty and the obligation to obey that voice as man's paramount duty-all this was of the essence of their ethics. Public life had the same cast. Their very government was a theocracy. At the head of it the God of Christian faith, its magistrates His servants, its citizens those only who had been initiated through Baptism and the reception of the Lord's Supper. In Virginia, indeed, the other distributing centre of the English race, becoming as it did an asylum for Cavaliers, broken aristocrats, and Church of England men, society and the temper of those who composed it presented a remarkable contrast to all this. But, mighty as the part has been which Virginia has played in politics, in war, and in commerce, she has been no factor in the spiritual and intellectual life of America, which was to take its bent from her austerer sons in the North.

Thus was produced, partly from what was inherited from their forefathers, and partly from what was the result of the long probation and discipline of those iron times, a race of men the like of which this world has never seen. Indelible is the impression which they have made on all who have contributed, and on all which has been contributed, either in politics or in literature, to the glory of America. We trace their lineaments in every great statesman and in every great soldier who has succeeded them in the Western World, whether from the South or from the North. Their purity, their earnestness, their simplicity, the noble ardour of their love of liberty, their God-fearing spirit and profound sense of man's religious and moral responsibilities, permeate, or if they do not permeate,