found for thought, politics, society, literature. But while those vast changes had been shaking England, two generations of American colonists had cleared their forests, fought the savages, organized their townships and their trade, put money in their purses, and lived, though as yet hardly suspecting it, a life that was beginning to differentiate them from the men of the Old World. We must now glance at the various aspects of this isolated life of theirs, as it is revealed in their books.

CHAPTER II. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE

The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of records of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters written from California in 1849 to the "folks back East." Addressed to home-keeping Englishmen across the sea, they describe the new world, explain the present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the future. Captain John Smith's "True Relation," already alluded to, is the typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager energy, of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant instinct for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he cannot help poetizing in his prose. Codfishing is to him a "sport"; "and what sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge then angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle, over the silent streams of a calme Sea?" But the gallant Captain is also capable of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he writes back to the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: "When you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have."

America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith, but he owes his place in human memory today to the physical and mental energy with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the vividness with which he dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen. Whether, in that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of romancing a little, no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first teller of this peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have an indulgent audience.

But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William Strachey's "True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon and from the islands of the Bermudas" may or may not have given a hint to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in "The Tempest." In either case it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker, the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of the savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness and starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans." John Pory, of "the strong potations," who thinks that "good company is the soul of this life," nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the "crystal rivers and odoriferous woods" by reflecting that he is escaping envy and expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace during a Virginia exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses." Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a somewhat later day, since he speaks of having "read Mr. Smith's travels," draws the long bow of narrative quite as powerfully as the redoubtable Smith, and far more smoothly, as witness his accounts of starvation on shipboard and cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is an artist who would have delighted Stevenson.

All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were Englishmen, and most of them returned to England, where their books were printed and their remaining lives were passed. But far to the north east of Virginia there were two colonies of men who earned the right to say, in William Bradford's quiet words, "It is not with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again." One was the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth, headed by Bradford himself. The other was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, with John Winthrop as governor.

Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which are more than chronicles of adventure. They record the growth and government of a commonwealth. Both Bradford and Winthrop were natural leaders of men, grave, dignified, solid, endowed with a spirit that bred confidence. Each was learned. Winthrop, a lawyer and man of property, had a higher social standing than Bradford, who was one of the Separatists of Robinson's flock at Leyden. But the Pilgrim of the Mayflower and the well-to-do Puritan of the Bay Colony both wrote their annals like gentlemen and scholars. Bradford's "History of Plymouth Plantation" runs from 1620 to 1647. Winthrop's diary, now printed as the "History of New England," begins with his voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of his death, 1649. As records of an Anglo-Saxon experiment in self-government under pioneer conditions these books are priceless; as human documents, they illuminate the Puritan character; as for "literary" value in the narrow sense of that word, neither Bradford nor Winthrop seems to have thought of literary effect. Yet the leader of the Pilgrims has passages of grave sweetness and charm, and his sketch of his associate, Elder Brewster, will bear comparison with the best English biographical writing of that century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in tone, as he is in matter, but he writes throughout as a ruler of men should write, with "decent plainness and manly freedom." His best known pages, justly praised by Tyler and other historians of American thought, contain his speech before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true liberty. No paragraphs written in America previous to the Revolution would have given more pleasure to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that Lincoln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor, Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction.

The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two generations of New England pioneers has often been called a "theocracy," that is to say, a government according to the Word of God as expounded and enforced by the clergy. The experiment was doomed to ultimate failure, for it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts of human nature. But its administration was in the hands of able men. The power of the clergy was well-nigh absolute. The political organization of the township depended upon the ecclesiastical organization as long as the right to vote was confined to church members. How sacrosanct and awful was the position of the clergyman may be perceived from Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" and "The Scarlet Letter."

Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and Norton, had every instinct and capacity for leadership. With the notable exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's opinion that "Democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst form of government." They were fiercely intolerant. The precise reason for the Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford in 1636—the very year of the founding of Harvard—was prudently withheld, but it is now thought to be the instinct of escape from the clerical architects of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today call Thomas Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty though he proved to be. His extant sermons have the steady stroke of a great hammer; smiting at the mind and heart. "Others because they have felt the heavy hand of God... upon these grounds they build their hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope to have heaven in the world to come; I hope the worst is over.'" Not so, thunders the