Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE COLONIAL PERIOD The English settlements in North America began at a time when English literature had just reached its most glorious period. Shakspere was writing his plays when Captain John Smith first explored Chesapeake Bay. Milton was born the year before Henry Hudson first sailed up the noble river that now bars his name. Bacon published his great book on philosophical and scientific method only a few months before the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. The men who left England for conscience' sake were many of them scholars with a love for learning. But in this fierce new land in which they sought to establish themselves, they had no time, at first, to do anything more than defend their. lives, build their houses, plant their fields, and set up their churches and their schools. They were strong men, laboring mightily, and laying the broad foundations of the republic we live under to-day. What they wrote then had always an immediate object. They set down in black and white tluir compacts, their laws, and their own important doings. They described the condition of affairs in the colonies to the kinsfolk and the friends they had left behind in the mother country. They prepared elaborate treatises in which they set forth their own vigorous ideas about religion. For singing songs or for telling tales, they had neither leisure nor taste; so we find no early American novelist and no early American poet. Perhaps the beginnings of American literature are to be sought in the books written by the first adventurers for the purpose of giving an account of the strange countries in which they had traveled. Of these adventurers, the most interesting was Captain John Smith. He was born in England in 1579. As a lad, he ran away to become a soldier, and saw much fighti...