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The Two Periods.—I have taken the year 1676 as the year of partition between the two periods into which our colonial age seems to fall. Before 1676, the new civilisation in America was principally in the hands of Americans born in England; after 1676, it was principally in the hands of Americans born in America, and the subjects of such training as was to be had here. Our first colonial period, therefore, transmits to us a body of writings produced by immigrant Americans; preserving for us the ideas, the moods, the efforts, the very phrases of the men who founded the American nation; representing to us, also, the earliest literary results flowing from the reactions of life in the New World upon an intellectual culture formed in the Old World. Our second colonial period does more: it transmits to us a body of writings, produced in the main by the American children of those immigrants, and representing the earliest literary results flowing from the reactions of life in the New World upon an intellectual culture that was itself formed in the New World.

Our first colonial period, just seventy years long, we have now briefly examined. For my part, I have no apology to make for it: I think it needs none. It was a period principally engaged in other tasks than the tasks of the pen; it laid, quietly and well, the foundation of a new social structure that was to cover a hemisphere, was to give shelter and comfort to myriads of the human race, was to endure to centuries far beyond the gropings of our guesswork. Had it done that deed alone, and left no written word at all, not any man since then could have wondered; still less could any man have flung at it the reproach of intellectual lethargy or neglect. But if, besides what it did in the founding of a new commonwealth, we consider what it also did in the founding of a new literature—the muchness of that special work, the downright merit of it—we shall find it hard to withhold from that period the homage of our admiration.

From the year 1676, when our first colonial period ends, there stretches onward a space of just eighty-nine years, at the end of which the American colonies underwent a swift and portentous change—losing, all at once, their colonial content, and passing suddenly into the earlier and the intellectual stage of their struggle for independence. This space of eighty-nine years forms, of course, our second colonial period.

New England Verse-Writers.—Urian Oakes, born in 1631, was reared in the woods of Concord. The splendid literary capacity of this early American—this product of our pioneer and autochthonous culture—is seen in this: as his sermons are among the noblest specimens of prose to be met with, in that class of writings, during the colonial time, so the one example that is left to us of his verse reaches the highest point touched by American poetry during the same era. The poem thus referred to is an elegy upon the death of a man to whom the poet seems to have been bound by the tenderest friendship—a poem in fifty-two six-lined stanzas; not without some mechanical defects; blurred also by some patches of the prevailing theological jargon; yet, upon the whole, affluent, stately, pathetic; beautiful and strong with the beauty and strength of true imaginative vision.

In contemporaneous renown, far above all other verse-writers of the colonial time, was Michael Wigglesworth, the explicit and unshrinking rhymer of the Five Points of Calvinism; a poet who so perfectly uttered in verse the religious faith and emotion of Puritan New England that, for more than a hundred years, his writings had universal diffusion there, and a popular influence only inferior to that of the Bible and the Shorter Catechism. No one holding a different theology from that held by Michael Wigglesworth can do justice to him as a poet, without exercising the utmost intellectual catholicity. His verse is quite lacking in art; its ordinary form being a crude, swinging ballad-measure, with a sort of cheap melody, a shrill, reverberating clatter, that would instantly catch and please the popular ear, at that time deaf to daintier and more subtile effects in poetry. In the multitude of his verses, Michael Wigglesworth surpasses all other poets of the colonial time, excepting Anne Bradstreet. Besides numerous minor poems, he is the author of three poetical works of considerable length. One of these, God’s Controversy with New England, was “written in the time of the great drought,” 1662. The argument of the poem is this: “New England planted, prospered, declining, threatened, punished.” The poet holds the opinion, common enough in his day, that before the arrival of the English in America, this continent had been the choice and peculiar residence of the Devil and his angels. Another large poem of Wigglesworth’s is Meat out of the Eater; or, Meditations concerning the Necessity, End, and Usefulness of Afflictions unto God’s Children, all tending to prepare them for and comfort them under the Cross. Here we have simply the Christian doctrine of comfort in sorrow, translated into metrical jingles. It was first published, probably, in 1669; ten years afterward, it had passed through at least four editions; and during the entire colonial age, it was a much-read manual of solace in affliction. But the masterpiece of Michael Wigglesworth’s genius, and his most delectable gift to an admiring public, was that blazing and sulphurous poem, The Day of Doom; or, A poetical Description of the great and last Judgment. This great poem, which, with entire unconsciousness, attributes to the Divine Being a character the most execrable and loathsome to be met with, perhaps, in any literature, Christian or pagan, had for a hundred years a popularity far exceeding that of any other work, in prose or verse, produced in America before the Revolution. The eighteen hundred copies of the first edition were sold within a single year; which implies the purchase of a copy of The Day of Doom by at least every thirty-fifth person then in New England—an example of the commercial success of a book never afterward equalled in this country. Since that time, the book has been repeatedly published; at least once in England, and at least eight times in America—the last time being in 1867.

The Dynasty of the Mathers.—At the time of his arrival in Boston—August, 1635—Richard Mather was thirty-nine years of age; a man of extensive and precise learning in the classics, in the Scriptures, and in divinity; already a famous preacher. This man, “the progenitor of all the Mathers in New England,” and the first of a line of great preachers and great men of letters that continued to hold sway there through the entire colonial era, had in himself the chief traits that distinguished his family through so long a period;—great physical endurance, a voracious appetite for the reading of books, an alarming propensity to the writing of books, a love of political leadership in church and state, the faculty of personal conspicuousness, finally, the homiletic gift. His numerous writings were, of course, according to the demand of his time and neighbourhood;—sermons, a catechism, a treatise on justification, public letters upon church government, several controversial documents, the preface to the Old Bay Psalm Book, and many of the marvels of metrical expression to be viewed in the body of that work.

Of the six sons of Richard Mather, four became famous preachers, two of them in Ireland and in England, other two in New England; the greatest of them all being the youngest, born at Dorchester, June 21, 1639, and at his birth adorned with the name of Increase, in graceful recognition of “the increase of every sort, wherewith God favoured the country about the time of his nativity.” Even in childhood he began to display the strong and eager traits that gave distinction and power to his whole life, and that bore him impetuously through the warfare of eighty-four mortal years. In 1657, on his eighteenth birthday, he preached in his father’s pulpit his first sermon. From 1661 to 1664 he divided his services between his father’s church at Dorchester and the North Church of Boston. At last, in 1664, he consented to be made minister of the latter church, which, thenceforward, to the end of his own life, and to the end of the life of his more famous son, continued to be the tower and the stronghold of the Mathers in America. Here, then, was a person, born in America, bred in America—a clean specimen of what America could do for itself in the way of keeping up the brave stock of its first imported citizens. As to learning, he even exceeded all other New Englanders of the colonial time, except his own son, Cotton. His power as a pulpit-orator was very great. It was a common saying of his contemporaries, that Increase Mather was “a complete preacher.” From a literary point of view, his writings certainly have considerable merit. The publications of Increase Mather defy mention, except in the form of a catalogue. From the year 1669, when he had reached the age of thirty, until the year 1723, when he died, hardly a twelvemonth was permitted to pass in which he did not solicit the public attention through the press. An authentic list of his works would include at least ninety-two titles. Of all the great host of Increase Mather’s publications, perhaps only one can be said to have still any power of walking alive on the earth—the book commonly known by a name not given to it by the author, Remarkable Providences. It cannot be denied that the conception of the book is thoroughly scientific; for it is to prove by induction the actual presence of supernatural forces in the world. Its chief defect, of course, is its lack of all cross-examination of the witnesses, and of all critical inspection of their testimony, together with a palpable eagerness on the author’s part to welcome, from any quarter of the earth or sea or sky, any messenger whatever who may be seen hurrying toward Boston with his mouth full of marvels.

In the intellectual distinction of the Mather family, there seemed to be, for at least three generations, a certain cumulative felicity. The general acknowledgment of this fact is recorded in an old epitaph, composed for the founder of the illustrious tribe:

Under this stone lies Richard Mather,

Who had a son greater than his father,

And eke a grandson greater than either.

This overtopping grandson was, of course, none other than Cotton Mather, the literary behemoth of New England in our colonial era; the man whose fame as a writer surpasses, in later times and especially in foreign countries, that of any other pre-Revolutionary American, excepting Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. The most famous book produced by him—the most famous book, likewise, produced by any American during the colonial time—is Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its first Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord 1698. The Magnalia is, indeed, what the author called it, “a bulky thing,”—the two volumes of the latest edition having upwards of thirteen hundred pages. The Magnalia has great merits; it has, also, fatal defects. In its mighty chaos of fables and blunders and misrepresentations, are of course lodged many single facts of the utmost value, personal reminiscences, social gossip, snatches of conversations, touches of description, traits of character and life, that can be found nowhere else, and that help us to paint for ourselves some living picture of the great men and the great days of early New England; yet herein, also, history and fiction are so jumbled and shuffled together that it is never possible to tell, without other help than the author’s, just where the fiction ends and the history begins. On no disputed question of fact is the unaided testimony of Cotton Mather of much weight. The true place of Cotton Mather in our literary history is indicated when we say that he was the last, the most vigorous, and, therefore, the most disagreeable representative of the Fantastic School in literature; and that he prolonged in New England the methods of that school even after his most cultivated contemporaries there had outgrown them, and had come to dislike them. The expulsion of the beautiful from thought, from sentiment, from language; a lawless and a merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent; strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantries, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, monstrosities of phrase;—these are the traits of Cotton Mather’s writing, even as they are the traits common to that perverse and detestable literary mood that held sway in different countries of Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its birthplace was Italy; New England was its grave; Cotton Mather was its last great apostle.

Samuel Mather, the son of Cotton Mather, was born in 1706. In him, evidently, the ancestral fire had become almost extinct. He had abundant learning; was extremely industrious; published many things; but there was not in them, as there was not in him, the victorious energy of an original mind, or even the winning felicity of an imitative one. He was a sturdy and a worthy man. He left no successor to continue the once-splendid dynasty of his tribe. He was the last, and the least, of the Mathers.

The Laity in New England Literature.—In the history of literature in New England during the colonial time, one fact stands out above all others—the intellectual leadership of the clergy, and that, too, among a laity neither ignorant nor weak. This leadership was in every sense honourable, both for the leaders and the led. It was not due alone to the high authority of the clerical office in New England; it was due still more to the personal greatness of the men who filled that office, and who themselves made the office great. They were intellectual leaders because they deserved to be; for, living among a well-educated and high-spirited people, they knew more, were wiser, were abler, than all other persons in the community. Of such a leadership, it was an honour even to be among the followers. And in the literary achievements of New England in the colonial time, the clergy filled by far the largest space, because, in all departments of writing, they did by far the largest amount of work. After the first half-century of New England life, another fact comes into notice—the advance of the laity in literary activity. By that time, many strong and good men, who had been educated there in all the learning of the age, either not entering the clerical profession or not remaining in it, began to organise and to develop the other learned professions—the legal, medical, and tuitionary—and, appealing to the public through various forms of literature, to divide more and more with the clergy the leadership of men’s minds. Moreover, in the last decade of the seventeenth century, an attempt was made to establish a newspaper in New England. The attempt failed. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, another attempt was made, and did not fail; and long before the end of our colonial epoch, a new profession had come into existence, having a power to act on the minds of men more mightily than any other—the profession of journalism.

The Almanac.—No one who would penetrate to the core of early American literature, and would read in it the secret history of the people in whose minds it took root and from whose minds it grew, may by any means turn away, in lofty literary scorn, from the almanac. The earliest record of this species of literature in America carries us back to the very beginning of printed literature in America; for, next after a sheet containing The Freeman’s Oath, the first production that came from the printing-press in this country was An Almanac calculated for New England, by Mr. Pierce, and printed at Cambridge, in 1639. Thenceforward for a long time, scarcely a year passed over that solitary printing-press at Cambridge without receiving a similar salute from it. In 1676, Boston itself grew wise enough to produce an almanac of its own. Ten years afterward, Philadelphia began to send forth almanacs—a trade in which, in the following century, it was to acquire special glory. In 1697, New York entered the same enticing field of enterprise. The first almanac produced in Rhode Island was in 1728; the first almanac produced in Virginia was in 1731. In 1733, Benjamin Franklin began to publish what he called Poor Richard’s Almanac, to which his own personal reputation has given a celebrity surpassing that of all other almanacs published anywhere in the world. Thus, year by year, with the multiplication of people and of printing-presses in this country, was there a multiplication of almanacs, some of them being of remarkable intellectual and even literary merit. Throughout our colonial time, when larger books were costly and few, the almanac had everywhere a hearty welcome and frequent perusal.

History and Biography in New England.—The one form of secular literature for which, during the entire colonial age, the writers of New England had the most authentic vocation is history. Our second literary period produced four considerable historians—William Hubbard, Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, Thomas Hutchinson: the first two excelling in popularity all other historians of the colonial time; the last two excelling all others in specific training for the profession of history, and in the conscious accumulation of materials for historic work. Of that species of history which is devoted to the lives of individuals rather than of communities, there were many specimens produced in the colonial epoch. But it is a singular fact that, in literary quality, the biographies written in colonial New England are far inferior to its histories.

Pulpit Literature in New England.—In our progress over the various fields of literature in New England during the colonial time, we encounter not one form of writing in which we are permitted to lose sight of the clergy of New England—their tireless and versatile activity, their learning, their force of brain, their force of character. The immigrant clergy of New England—the founders of this noble and brilliant order—were, in nearly all qualities of personal worth and greatness, among the greatest and the worthiest of their time, in the mother-country—mighty scholars, orators, sages, saints. And by far the most wonderful thing about these men is, that they were able to convey across the Atlantic, into a naked wilderness, all the essential elements of that ancient civilisation out of which they came; and, at once, to raise up and educate, in the New World, a line of mighty successors in their sacred office, without the least break in the sequence, without the slightest diminution in scholarship, in eloquence, in intellectual energy, in moral power.

Jonathan Edwards.—Jonathan Edwards, the most original and acute thinker yet produced in America, was born in 1703; in 1758 he was installed as president of the College of New Jersey, and died a few weeks afterward. Both by his father and by his mother, he came of the gentlest and most intellectual stock in New England. In early childhood, he began to manifest those powerful, lofty, and beautiful endowments, of mind and of character, that afterward distinguished him—spirituality, conscientiousness, meekness, simplicity, disinterestedness, and a marvellous capacity for the acquisition of knowledge and for the prosecution of independent thought. It is, perhaps, impossible to name any department of intellectual exertion, in which, with suitable outward facilities, he might not have achieved supreme distinction. Certainly, he did enough to show that had he given himself to mathematics, or to physical science, or to languages, or to literature—especially the literature of imagination and of wit—he would have become one of the world’s masters. The traditions of his family, the circumstances of his life, the impulses derived from his education and from the models of personal greatness before his eyes, all led him to give himself to mental science and divinity; and in mental science and divinity, his achievements will be remembered to the end of time.