The exploration and settlement of the country was a great adventure, which involved not only peril, but very hard work. In every colony people had to begin at the beginning,--to get roofs over their heads to protect them from the climate, to raise the things they were to eat, to protect themselves from the Indians,--to do a thousand things of which people of our day are unconscious because they were done so long ago. The distances between the colonies were great, the means of communication were slow and infrequent, and the colonists knew very little of one another. They were isolated communities, not in any sense a nation. And so the early writing was the expression of the experiences and convictions of small communities. There cannot be a national literature until there is a national consciousness; and in the early days in America there was not even a sectional consciousness. There was only local consciousness.
[Illustration: THE JONATHAN EDWARDS ELM, Northampton, Mass.
Set by Jonathan Edwards in 1730--The house of Josiah D. Whitney stands on the right of Edwards’ house]
The first book written on the continent was by that flamboyant, but very versatile Virginia colonist, Captain John Smith; a brave soldier, with a very warm and highly inventive imagination, whose habit of boasting has robbed him of a great deal of credit which really belonged to him. He wrote an account of adventures in Virginia, which may be taken as the beginning of American writing, and still has value. There was a long interval during which the writing of the colonists was devoted to theological discussion, or to accounts of the new world in which they were living.
A large part of the early writings of New England was more or less theological; but none of this writing rose to the rank of literature until Jonathan Edwards appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century.
The son of a minister who was a lover of learning as well as of religion, like a great many other ministers of his time in New England, who prepared young men for college, and gave his daughters the same kind of instruction in the same subjects. Edwards was also the grandson of a minister on his mother’s side; and his ancestry, like his descendants, was notable for intellectual vigor. He graduated from Yale College at the age of thirteen,--not an uncommon happening in that day of few entrance requirements,--and the qualities of his mind and the direction of his taste are indicated by the fact that he was already making notes on the mind and on natural philosophy. He studied for the ministry, and when he was twenty-four years old settled at Northampton, Massachusetts, where he was fortunate enough to marry a woman as remarkable as himself, of whom he wrote a description which has become a classic in the literature of love. Edwards was pursued by a haunting sense of sinfulness, and the depravity of the world often weighed heavily upon him. Mrs. Edwards happily combined a piety equal to that of her husband with great cheerfulness of disposition.