ittle communities which had hardly yet secured a
foothold on the edge of the raw continent.

Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements,
when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and
commerce was building up large towns, and there were wealth and
generous living and fine society, the "good old colony days when we
lived under the king," had yielded little in the way of literature that
is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the
relation of a colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and
art of the former to a helpless provincialism. Canada and Australia
are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the thirteen
colonies at the time of their separation from England. They have
cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well-equipped
universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public buildings, all the
outward appliances of an advanced civilization; and yet what have
Canada and Australia contributed to British literature?

American literature had no infancy. That engaging _naivete_ and that
heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs
of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. Instead of
emerging from the twilight of the past the first American writings were
produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age.
Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial
literature. The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge
to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on
imitating the cast-off literary fashions of the mother-country.
America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the
greatest names in English literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607,
nine years before Shakespeare's death, and the hero of that enterprise,
Captain John Smith, may not improbably have been a personal
acquaintance of the great dramatist. "They have acted my fatal
tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many circumstances in _The
Tempest_ were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the _Sea Venture_ on
"the still vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his
_True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates_,
written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1610. Shakespeare's
contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the _Polyolbion_, addressed
a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic
m