th."

Thus, this epic ends with a neat little moral, and with the comforting
assurance that White Aster, her father, and husband lived happy ever
afterward.

AMERICAN EPICS

When Europeans first landed on this continent, they found it occupied
by various tribes of Indians, speaking--it is estimated--some six
hundred different languages or dialects. At first no systematic effort
could be made to discover the religion or traditions of the native
Americans, but little by little we have learned that they boasted a
rich folk-lore, and that their nature-myths and hero-tales were
recited by the fireside from generation to generation. Because there
were tribes in different degrees of evolution between savagery and the
rudimentary stages of civilization, there are more or less rude myths
and folk-tales in the samples with which we have thus become familiar.

Among the more advanced tribes, Indian folk-lore bears the imprint of
a weirdly poetical turn of mind, and ideas are often vividly and
picturesquely expressed by nature similes. Some of this folk-lore is
embodied in hymns, or what have also been termed nature-epics, which
are now being carefully preserved for future study by professional
collectors of folk-lore. Aside from a few very interesting creation
myths and stories of the Indian gods, there is a whole fund of nature
legends of which we have a characteristic sample in Bayard Taylor's
Mon-da-min, or Creation of the Maize, and also in the group of legends
welded into a harmonious whole by Longfellow in the "American-Indian
epic" Hiawatha.

The early European settlers found so many material obstacles to
overcome, that they had no leisure for the cultivation of literature.
Aside from letters, diaries, and reports, therefore, no early colonial
literature exists. But, with the founding of the first colleges in
America,--Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, the College of New Jersey,
and King's College (now Columbia),--and with the introduction of the
printing press, the American literary era may be said to begin.

The Puritans, being utterly devoid of aesthetic taste, considered all
save religious poetry sinful in the extreme; so it was not until the
middle of the seventeenth century that Fame could trumpet abroad the
advent of "the Tenth Muse," or "the Morning Star of American Poetry,"
in the person of Anne Bradstreet! Among her poems--which no one ever
reads nowadays--is "An Exact Epitome of the Three First Mona