The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods Seventeenth Prior to the American Revolution there Century was not produced in America any work that we may call real literature. During the seventeenth century, the age that saw Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden, there were written in the American colonies numberless essays, sermons and history, and a little verse, but none that is still read. The Poems of Anne Bradstreet, called the first professional poet of America, have merit that is "negative rather than positive." Says Richardson, "They are not so bad as they might have been, and occasionally proffer a good thought or a decent line." The Day of Doom by Rev. Michael Wigglesworth was the most popular poem of the day. It is an exposition of the awful Calvanistic doctrine that the unelect infants will be eternally damned. There was nothing to justify the extent of its success but the sincerity with which it was written and its truthfulness in the eyes of the stern old Puritans. The popularity of this poem makes the contrast between the literature of England and America seem very apparent, if we stop to think that the marvelous dramas of Shakespeare were then new to the mother country and probably were wholly unknown in the colonies. Cotton He In 1636 Harvard College was founded with the express purpose of preserving the Puritan form of religion, but though it has always remained protestant, it has been liberal and done much to destroy the very rigidities it was intended to perpetuate. Its President, Increase Mather, and his son, Cotton, labored hard to make the college a school of priestly character, but were unable to quell the liberal spirit that had made the Puritans rebellious subjects of the mother church. Cotton Mather was a voluminous writer of historical and religious subjects. was a believer in witchcraft and has been held largely responsible in public opinion for the terrible tragedy at Salem. His most celebrated work is the Magnalia, an ecclesiastical history of New England. It is not a history as we understand the term, but a controversial work intended to demonstrate that God had favored the Puritan cause through the three generations that had lived since Massachusetts was founded. It cannot be called literature, though in spite of the mass of ill-digested material, superstitions and inaccurate detail there are interesting biographies and narratives, if one can separate them from the mass of waste material. His loose and ponderous sentences, his pedantic affectations, greedy use of Latin phrases and general laxity of style make him dull and difficult to read. Jonathan To the early part of the eighteenth century we must assign Jonathan Ed The Revolutionary Period wards, a theologian who more than any other has exerted an influence on American thought. For about a hundred years his great work, an argument against the freedom of the will, was accepted as unanswerable by the theologians of his school and day, and even now if his premises are allowed his conclusions seem to follow inevitably. He upheld strenuously the doctrines of original sin, total depravity, election and eternal punishment. He represented merely the moral life of the New England colonists. Benjamin Benjamin Franklin who stood in politFranklin ical and social life as Jonathan Edwards did in the moral and religious life, is the one other great name that figures conspicuously before the Revolution. There is in his writings besides practical, homely, common sense a certain literary quality that puts them above anything written at that time. His importance has been duly recognized, and a biographical sketch and suitable extracts will be found in Part Fifteen, page 125, and page 27. Revolutionary The era of the Revolution gave the public a great quantity of patriotic and political matter in the shape of argumentative essays and addresses. Freedom and the rights of man were ably championed and sometimes the heights of impassioned eloquence were reached. Thomas Paine's Crisis and Common Sense, with the essays of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay which appeared in the newspapers and were afterwards |