left little time to be devoted to the arts and graces of literature.
The whole period produced nothing of literary worth. A few writings, the offspring mainly of necessity, have come down to us, but they are valuable simply as curiosities or as documents for the historian. The period is to be studied not for its literary product, but for the light it throws on our later literary history.
Virginia and Massachusetts. — (Tyler, 83-85; Fiske, Civil Government, 16–19, 57–62; Johns Hopkins University Studies.) The two colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts are all that need be studied in an elementary history of American literature. They are the fountain heads of all that is strongest in our national and our literary history. Planted for widely different reasons, by men of almost opposite traits of character, and for more than a century having no intercourse at all with each other, they at length became the intellectual centres of our early national life. Lowell has called them "The two great distributing centres of the English race" in America. (See Among My Books, 1st series, 239.)
1. VIRGINIA.
*******
