Part 8 (1/2)

Unlike any other colony of the New World, the sole purpose and ht peltries and trade in general, and whereever they established theave tokens of material comfort and prosperity Theto it the freedoe hospitality possible where miles of land formed the plantation, and service meant no direct outlay or expense

Here and there a Southern Puritan was found, as his typethe char himself a missionary to the Indians of South Carolina, or to settlees, but for the lish squire-ruled country prevailed, and were enlarged upon; eachDispersion of forces was the order, and thus many necessities of civilization were dispensed with The man who had a river at his door had no occasion to worry over thehis supplies, and bridle-paths sufficing his horse and himself With no need for strenuous conflict with nature or man, the power of resistance died naturally Sharp lines softened; enerations the type had so altered that the people who had left England as one, were two, once for all

The law of dispersion, practical and agreeable to the Southern landholder, would have been destruction to his New England brethren For the latter, concentration was the only safety They ether in close coeneral rather than for the individual good In such close quarters, where every angle made itself felt, and constant contact developed and implied criticis co was strengthened to the utmost, and merciless condemnation for one's self came to mean a still sharper one for others With every power of brain and soul they fought against what, to them, seemed the one evil for that or any tiht, and was able to put it into strong words No colony has ever known so large a proportion of learned e and Oxford between the years 1630 and 1690 than it was possible to find in a population of the saland was not an agricultural co co coan being not the hand, nor the heart, nor the pocket, but the brain”

The , we have seen, was of the scantiest, not only for Winthrop's Colony but for those that preceded it

The three little shi+ps that, on a misty afternoon in December, 1606, dropped down the Thaht but that of books Book-makers were there in less proportion than on board the solitary vessel that, in 1620, took a more northerly course, and cast anchor at last off the bleak and sullen shore of Massachusetts; but for both alike the stress of those early years left sy or time for any composition beyond the reports that, at stated intervals, went back to the mother country The work of the pioneer is forsmall opportunity, save as director; and it required eneration before authorshi+p could beco excepted from the stress of hard manual labor

Yet, for the first departure, an enthusiasland of that day had not been too kindly toward her men of letters, ere then, as now, alsobetter than the best she had to offer, and who, in the early years of the seventeenth century, gathered in London as the centre least touched by the bigotry and narrowness of one party, the wild laxity and folly of the other

”The very air of London must have been electric with the daily words of those immortals whose casual talk upon the pavee of speech richer, more virile, reat days of Atheman poetry, eloquence and ers, philosophers” For every one of the undefined, yet infinitely precious, to be born of all the mysterious influences in that new land to which all eyes turned, and old Michael Drayton's ringing ode on their departure held also a prophecy:

”In kenning of the shore, Thanks to God first given, O you, the happiestthe wide heaven

”And in regions far Such heroes bring ye forth As those from e came; And plant our name Under that star Not known unto our north

”And as there plenty grows Of laurel everywhere-- Apollo's sacred tree-- You, itthere”

Theover to Alishmen, were the friends and associates--the intellectual equals in e of brilliant and audacious intellects; and chief a them was the man at whose name we are all inclined to smile--Captain John Smith So many myths have hid the real man fro--that we forget how vivid and resolute a personality he owned, and the pride we may well have in him as the writer of the first distinctively Ainia, but for New England as well His life was given to the interests of both Defeated plans, baffled hopes, had no power to quench the absorbing love that filled him to the end, and, at the very last, he wrote of the American colonies: ”By that acquaintance I have with them, I call them my children; for they have been my wife, my hawks, hounds, my cards, my dice, and, in total, my best content, as indifferent to ht”

Certain qualities,disappearance, becoree at least, characteristic of the time The book man of to-day is quite as likely to be also the man of affairs, and the pale and cloistered student of the past is rather a memory than a present fact History thus repeats itself as usual, and the story of the literary men of the nineteenth century has many points in common with that of the seventeenth

Sland had had active circulation in the Mother Country, and many a Puritan trusted it entirely, ould have frowned upon the writer had he appeared in person to testify of what he had seen Certainly the Cavalier predo of the noble one ”of which the Elizabethan age produced so many examples--the man of action as also the man of letters; the man of letters as also a man of action; the wholesomest type of manhood anywhere to be found; body and brain both active, both cultivated; the mind not made fastidious and morbid by too much bookishness, nor coarse and dull by too little; not a doer who is due that coe that comes of experience; the literary sense fortified by common sense; the bashfulness and delicacy of the scholar hovering as a finer presence above the forceful audacity of the man of the world; at once bookman, penman, swordsman, diplomat, sailor, courtier, orator Of this type of , refined and sane, were the best ne, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, in a modified sense, Hakluyt, Bacon, Sackville, Shakespeare, Ben Johnson and nearly all the rest”

It would have been impossible to ht easily have become a John Smith It is worth while to recall his work and that of his fellow colonists, if only to note the wide and iht in the northern and southern colonies, even where the Puritan element entered in, nor can we understand Anne Bradstreet, without a thought of the forces at work in the new country, unconscious but potent causes of all phases of literary life in that early tie of the world and less knowledge of hi no part of his mental constitution or habit

Intellectually, he demanded a spherical excellence, easier then than now, and attained by many a student of that day, and to this Captain John aspired, one at least of his conte proof of faith that he had attained it in lines written on hiland:

”Like Caesar, now thou writ'st what them hast done

These acts, this book, will live while there's a sun”

The history is picturesque, and often a As a writer he was always ”racy, terse, fearless,” but, save to the special student, there is little value to the present student, unless he be a searcher after the spirit that h him, the time he moulded For such reader will still be felt ”the inanimity, affluence, sense and executive force Over all his personal associates in American adventure he seems to tower, by the natural loftiness and reach of the perception hich he grasped the significance of their vast enterprise and the means to its success He had the faults of an iinative nature; he soreat abilities in word and deed; his nature was, upon the whole, generous and noble; and during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, he did lishman to make an American nation and an American literature possible”

Behind the stockade at Jamestown, only theJoyful as the landing had been, the Colony had no sturdy backbone of practical workers

Their first summer was unutterably forlorn, the beauty and fertility that had seemed to pro with it only a ”horrible trail of homesickness, discord, starvation, pestilence and Indian hostility” No common purpose united them, as in the Northern Colony Save for the leaders, individual profit had been the only ambition or intention Work had no place in the scheed its load of irants matters were hardly mended Perpetual discord became the law

Smith fled fro succession of soon-discouraged officers waged a species of hand-to-hand conflict with the wild elee Sandys, whose na and value to the student, found leisure, borrowed froht, for a translation of Ovid's ”Metamorphoses,” commended by both Dryden and Pope, and which passed at once through eight editions, but there were no others

Twenty years of colonial life had ended when he returned to England, and the spirit of the early founders had well nigh disappeared Literary work had died with it A few had small libraries, chiefly Latin classics, but a curious torpor had settled down, the reasons for which are now evident There was no constant intercourse, as in New England The ”policy of dispersion” was the law, for every e land- owner, and, in the midst of his tract of half-cleared land, had small communication with any but his inferiors Within fifty years any intellectual standard had practically ceased to exist The Governor, Sir Williaress, thundered against the printing-press, and believed absolutely in the ”fine old conservative policy of keeping subjects ignorant in order to keep theies were bent in this direction Protest of any sort simply intensified his purpose, and when 1670 dawned he had the happiness of lish Coh hardly in the sense anticipated, when he wrote: ”I thank God there are no free schools, nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged theovernment

God keep us from both”

A dark prayer, and answered as fully as men's own acts can fulfill their prayers The brilliant men who had passed from the scene had no successors The few malcontents were silenced by a lahich made ”even the first thrust of the pressman's lever a cri nor desire for printing in any general sense The point where our literature began had become apparently its burial-place; the historians and poets and students of an earlier generation were not only unheeded but forgotten, and a hundred years of intellectual barrenness, with another hundred, before even partial recovery could be apparent, were the portion of Virginia and all the states she influenced or controlled No power could have made it otherwise ”Had much literature been produced there, would it not have been a miracle? The units of the community isolated; little chance for mind to kindle h or low; no public libraries; no printing-press; no intellectual freedo to create two great classes--a class of vast land-owners, haughty, hospitable, indolent, passionate, given to field sports and politics; and a class of impoverished white plebeians and black serfs; these constitute a situation out of which ed and jolly fox-hunters, militia heroes, race, astute and imperious politicians, fiery orators, and, by and by, here and there, perhaps after awhile, a few amateur literary men---but no literary class, and almost no literature”