sippi (formerly parts of Georgia), and Virginia and the Carolinas gave their tone to Tennessee and Kentucky; while all the Southern colonies were duplicated in some degree in the States arising west of the Mississippi, and in parts of the territories. In New Orleans was the peculiar French and Creole society, a bit of Gallic life in the New World, with quaint and sturdy characteristics, fond of the old home, but at last patriotic in the new. Its influence was social and industrial rather than literary. As All through these newer parts of the United States, governed by the English stock of the Northern and Southern colonies, have poured streams of foreign immigration, especially in the Northern diImmigrants. vision. In some of the territories the men of foreign birth are actually in the majority, and foreign elements are large throughout the whole West. in the East the Irish, Germans, and French Canadians are employed in manufacturing establishments and in mines, so the Germans and Scandinavians are farmers in the Northwest, and foreigners of various names are farmers, cattle-raisers, and miners on the Pacific coast. But wherever they are, they soon become Americanized, in greater or less degree, and do not remain isolated or unassimilated elements, with the exception of the Chinese, Ital ians, and Hungarians. Still more generally is this found to be true in considering the foreign raceelements in American literature, which, in the West and Southwest, as elsewhere, are merely subordinate influences. Literature, in the vast region outside the thirteen original colonies, is English literature, sprung from the same sources and influenced by the same conditions that affected the literature of the Atlantic seaboard. One writer finds themes among the Louisiana Creoles, another in the lake country of Ohio and Michigan, another in the wild Tennessee mountains, another among the raw settlers of early Arkansas, another with the Californian miners, another in life on the plains, or in the Sierra Nevada mountains, or among the Indians; but writers and literature are English, under somewhat unfamiliar conditions, but never under a new race-domination. CHAPTER II. THE NEW ENVIRONMENT OF THE SAXON MIND. Physical THE physical conditions of the present territory of the United States have aided, from the outset, in its political and industrial, and by corollary its Conditions. intellectual development. Situated in the middle of North America, possessing a great number of harbors, lakes, and water-ways, affording a wide variety of soil and climate, and on its European settlement inhabited by a relatively small number of wandering Indians, this great region lent itself readily to the work of the principal colonization in the world's history. Its rich forests and fields, its suitable townsites and advantageous drainage basins, its hidden mines, its natural lines of communication with the sea, formed the basis for future national development. Race and physical forces have wrought, in this favored region, the results which a student of social science, had such existed two centuries and a half ago, might have foretold with a reasonable degree of confidence. The United States, like most of the leading nations of the world at the present time, is practically a cold-weather country. On the northern coast were most of the populous early settlements, and there the chief commercial influence has remained. From the northeast corner of the land, too, have come the greater part of the books which must be considered at length in these pages. Climate does not make character; still less does it produce literature. Cold weather cannot, by itself, make good writers, else Canada would have more literature to show. But the fact remains that the dominant forces in the world's civilization are now exerted from the northern part of highly civilized Europe and the United States, just as, two or three thousand years ago, they were exerted from the southern part of Europe and Asia. To this fact, as bearing upon questions of climate, the history of the United States adds a force hardly exerted by the records of an older civilization. The cognate relation of mountains to liberty and free thought, however, need not specially be considered here, for the seaboard and lowlands of the United States have produced its leaders in statecraft no less than in literature. The mountain regions of the country are still sparsely settled, and have produced a small indigenous literature. In considering the physical features of the country, which have chiefly influenced the distribution of its population, and in some lesser degree its literary growth, it must be remembered, however, that the literature, still more than the industries, of many of its sections must be a thing of future development. The country stretches from 25° to 49° in latitude, and from 67° to 125° in longitude; and its mean annual temperature ranges from below 40° to 75° and over. The annual rain-fall varies from 10 inches to 60, and the elevation from the sea-level rises to more than 10,000 feet. None but the most general deductions are possible, in considering a territory of this size, as to the effect of physical forces upon character. If New England has produced its Hawthorne, Emerson and Longfellow, no less can Virginia point to her Washington and Jefferson. But in the intellectual contest, the "stern and rock-bound coast" has usually had the advantage over the "sunny South' or the rich Western plains. Where cold freezes genius, or where heat enervates it, we cannot look for great books-save perhaps in Iceland; but it is enough to say that at present the greater literary productiveness seems to appear in the lands of the winter fire and the evening lamp, by the stormy sea which our ancestors have braved and loved for a thousand years. The colonial relation of the English-speaking (and Dutch and Swedish) settlements in America was of greater importance than the ordinary occu Colonial pation of a distant land by subjects of a crown. It was the precursor of the independence of a great nation; its partial freedom naturally developed into emancipation from the control of the old home; and it powerfully affected the politics, religion, and society of Europe itself. England owned the land, but varied her assertion of authority with virtual permission of local self-government; and she was content to leave the colonists somewhat to themselves, while she herself was slowly assuming, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the first position in the commerce of the world. New England was almost openly contemptuous of Charles I. and Charles II.; and though the English colonies, in theory, were |