In this outline of our literary progress it is especially designed to show how essentially American literature has been an outgrowth of American life. A people originally of English stock and increasingly open to European influences, we have nevertheless a national character, modified by local conditions, and a national point of view. Hence our literature, while in one aspect a branch of the noble parent literature of England, is rightly viewed, also, as the individual expression of an independent nation. Its significance to us, whose history it embodies and interprets, naturally outranks its absolute value among the older literatures of the world.

It is obvious that the limits of this survey forbid the mention of every distinguished name.

Sincere acknowledgements are due to the publishers for their patience, to Mr. Herbert Putnam and other officers of the Boston Public Library for their courtesy, and to my colleagues, Miss Lydia B. Godfrey, Wellesley librarian, and Professor Katharine Coman, for bibliographical and critical suggestions. The portraits of Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Hawthorne, and Thoreau appear by special permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. That of Irving is reproduced by permission of Messrs. G. P. Putnam's sons. Mr. William Evarts Benjamin, too, has kindly allowed the reproduction of his plates of Lanier, Parkman, and Cotton Mather, while for the likenesses of Lowell and Mrs. Stowe we are indebted to the friendliness of Mr. Francis V. Balch of Jamaica Plain, Mass., and Mrs. Samuel Scoville of Stamford, Conn.

K. L. B.

I. General Divisions of American Literature.--
Almost three centuries have passed since Englishmen began to plant settlements on the eastern coast of North America. Within the first century and a half, in round numbers, is embraced the Colonial Period of our life and letters. The Revolutionary agitation, conflict, victory, and resulting problems shaped, in the main, the literature of the following fifty years. The present century, nearly identical with the National Era, is really the first in which American books have won recognition. Yet the earlier centuries should not be ignore. The COLONIAL PERIOD is most easily handled in halves. The first seventy-five years may appropriately be termed the HEROIC AGE; the second seventy-five years the PROVINCIAL AGE. About the first two or three generations of settlers clung the large atmosphere of the Old World. Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, gallants of royalist houses, gentlemen and scholars, accustomed to the best in art, in thought, in society, lived in the log cabins of Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation. Between the forest and the ocean, they reared their children and their children's children in a certain breadth of culture. These Pilgrim Fathers and Gentlemen Adventurers were, like Æneas, a great part of the wonderful tale they told. Of all the splendid deeds on land and sea done by the countrymen and contemporaries of Shakespeare, not one outshines the painful, perilous colonization of America. Shipwreck, fever, famine, the wilderness, and the savage fought against the enterprise, but the resolute English temper, whether manifested in the bright courage of the cavalier or the stern persistence of the Puritan, faced disaster down.

The transition to a narrow outlook on life and a preoccupation with petty concerns was more marked in the North than in the South; for the wealthy planters of Virginia and her neighboring colonies continued, until the Revolution, to maintain the ancestral connection with Europe, often sending their sons across the Atlantic for education and travel. The southern settlers had brought with them to the New World the feudal tradition. Society had taken form in strata, with the great landowners at the top, the well-to-do farmers beneath, then poor whites and overseers, and under all a black mass of slaves. Notwithstanding the evil features of the system, there was, as always in such societies, the advantage of high development for individuals of the privileged class. At the cost of the toiling and suffering many, a favored few were set free to attain rare personal graces and powers. When the hour of the Revolution struck, and the destinies of a people hung in the balance, it was the South that gave the crisis the commander-in-chief, the most eloquent orator, the framer of the Declaration of Independence, the "Father of the Constitution," and the first president of the United States.

The northern colonists, on the other hand, represented in general the middle class of English society, the trades-people rather than the gentlefolk. Their memories were not of Tudor mansions embowered in park and beech groves, but of market-place, mill, smithy, and all the busy life of a Lancashire or Yorkshire town. They were dissenters from the Church of England, adherents of Cromwell and Parliament, men determined on democracy. The brave little colleges of Harvard and Yale sufficed them, as a rule, in place of foreign universities. They kept the level. If there were fewer giants in Massachusetts than in Virginia, fewer men pre-eminent for manners, wide experience of the world, and that distinction of bearing and character which springs from the habit of lordship, in average intelligence and morality the North far ouranked the South. Yet New England, as the seventeenth century drew to a close, showed in many ways the ill effects of her isolation from Europe. The Provincial Age had set in. The sense of proportion was lost. Primness, credulity, and pedantry stamped the scattered communities, intellectually starved and straitened as they were. Without the sting of peril, the lofty consciousness of a sincerity proved by immense sacrifice, by life risked daily for the sake of truth, wihout art, without adequate libraries, without that realizing knowledge of the myriad aspects and values of humanity promoted to-day by telegraph, cable, steam, newspapers, magazines, the mind became cramped and the religious vision blurred. The whipping of the Quakers was cruel, but the witchcraft trials were puerile as well. A smug and matter-of-fact quality, too, had crept into that stern piety. Bradford's Journal is touched with poetry and spirituality; not so Sewall's Diary. Yet the essential strain of Puritanism, the first moral fibre and ideal aspiration of the Pilgrims, subsisted and subsists.