the creation at this day doth loudly groan." Again, having reflected that war was caused by luxury in dress, etc., the use of dyed garments grew uneasy to him, and he got and wore a hat of the natural color of the fur. "In attending meetings, this singularity was a trial to me... and some Friends, who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew shy of me. . . . Those who spoke with me I generally informed, in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my own will."

Edited

1. Representative American Orations. by Alexander Johnston. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884.

2. The Federalist. New York: Charles Scribner. 1863.

3. Notes on Virginia. By Thomas Jefferson. Boston. 1829.

4. Travels in New England and New York. By Timothy Dwight. New Haven. 1821.

5. McFingal: in Trumbull's Poetical Works. Hartford: 1820.

6. Joel Barlow's Hasty Pudding. Francis Hopkinson's Modern Learning. Philip Freneau's Indian Student, Indian Burying-Ground, and White Honeysuckle: in Vol. I. of Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature. New York: Charles Scribner. 1866.

7. Arthur Mervyn. By Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: S. G. Goodrich. 1827.

8. The Journal of John Woolman. With an

Introduction by John G. Whittier. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1871.

9. American Literature. By Charles F. Richardson. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1887. IO. American Literature. By John Nichol. Edinburgh Adam & Charles Black.

1882.

rar

1815-1837.

THE attempt to preserve a strictly chronological order must here be abandoned. About all the American literature in existence, that is of any value literature, is the product of the past three quarters of a century, and the men who produced it, though older or younger, were still contempoIrving's Knickerbocker's History of New York 1809, was published within the recollection of some yet living, and the venerable poet, Richard H. Dana-Irving's junior by only four years-survived to 1879, when the youngest of the generation of writers that now occupy public attention had already won their spurs. Bryant, whose Thanatopsis was printed in 1816, lived down to 1878. He saw the beginnings of our national literature, and he saw almost as much of the latest phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1887. Still, even within the limits of a single life-time, there have been progress and change. And so, while it will happen that the consideration of writers a part of whose work falls between the dates at the head of this chapter may be postponed

on.

to subsequent chapters, we may in a gene way follow the sequence of time.

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cial

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-y, of

The period between the close of the sec with England, in 1815, and the great crash of 1837, has been called, in langua uted to President Monroe, "the era of g ing." It was a time of peace and prosp rapid growth in population and rapid extension of territory. The new nation was entering upon its vast estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny. The peace with Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian Indians and the other tribes in alliance with England, had opened up the North-west to settlement. Ohio had been admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnatad fina only seven thousand inhabitants, and half of the ge a State was unsettled. The Ohio River flowed for ood most of its course through an unbroken wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort. Hitherto the emigration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on the dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. This movement was stimulated in New England by the cold summer of 1816 and the late spring of 1817, which produced a scarcity of food that amounted in parts of the interior to a veritable famine. All through this period sounded the axe of the pioneer clearing the forest about his log cabin, and the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant wagon over the primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies

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or followed the valley of the Mohawk. S. G. Goodrich, known in letters as "Peter Parley," in his Recollections of a Lifetime, 1856, describes the part of the movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County, Conn.: "I remember very well the tide of emigration through Connecticut, on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some persons went in covered wagons-frequently a family consisting of father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast some on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettles, gridirons, feather beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling-book-the lares and penates of the household. Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of ten miles a day. '. . Many of these persons were in a state of poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival from fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that I published a small tract entitled 'Tother Side of Ohio—that is, the other view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the paradise of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand—a talented young physician of Berlin-who had made a visit to the West about these days. It consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads over the Alleghanies,