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 Monarchies, viz., the Assyrian, Persian, and Grecian, and the Beginning of the Roman Commonwealth to the End of their Last King," a work which some authorities rank as the first American epic (1650). This was soon (1662) followed by Michael Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom," or "Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement," wherein the author, giving free play to his imagination, crammed so many horrors that it afforded ghastly entertainment for hosts of young Puritans while it passed through its nine successive editions in this country and two in England. Although devoid of real poetic merit, this work never failed to give perusers "the creeps," as the following sample will sufficiently prove:

  Then might you hear them rend and tear
      The air with their outcries;
  The hideous noise of their sad voice
      Ascendant to the skies.
  They wring their hands, their caitiff hands,
      And gnash their teeth for terror;
  They cry, they roar, for anguish sore,
      And gnaw their tongue for horror.
  But get away without delay;
      Christ pities not your cry;
  Depart to hell, there may you yell
      And roar eternally.

The Revolutionary epoch gave birth to sundry epic ballads—such as Francis Hopkinson's Battle of the Kegs and Major André's Cow Chase—and "to three epics, each of them almost as long as the Iliad, which no one now reads, and in which one vainly seeks a touch of nature or a bit of genuine poetry." This enormous mass of verse includes Trumbull's burlesque epic, McFingal (1782), a work so popular in its day that collectors possess samples of no less than thirty pirated editions. Although favorably compared to Butler's Hudibras, and "one of the Revolutionary forces," this poem—a satire on the Tories—has left few traces in our language, aside from the familiar quotation:

  A thief ne'er felt the halter draw
  With good opinion of the law.

The second epic of this period is Timothy Dwight's "Conquest of Canaan" in eleven books, and the third Barlow's "Columbiad." The latter interminable work was based on the poet's pompous Vision of Columbus, which roused great admiration when it appear (1807). While professing to relate the memorable voyage of Columbus in a grandly heroic strain, the Columbiad introduces all manner of mythical and fantastic personages and events. In spite of its writer's learning and imagination, this voluminous epic fell quite flat when published, and there are now very few persons who have accomplished the feat of reading it all the way through. Still, it contains passages not without merit, as the following lines prove:

  Long on the deep the mists of morning lay,
  Then rose, revealing, as they rolled away,
  Half-circling hills, whose everlasting woods
  Sweep with their sable skirts the shadowy floods:
  And say, when all, to holy transport given,
  Embraced and wept as at the gates of Heaven,
  When one and all of us, repentant, ran,
  And, on our faces, blessed the wondrous man:
  Say, was I then deceived, or from the skies
  Burst on my ear seraphic harmonies?
  "Glory to God!" unnumbered voices sung:
  "Glory to God!" the vales and mountains rang.
  Voices that hailed Creation's primal morn,
  And to the shepherds sung a Saviour born.
  Slowly, bare-headed, through the surf we bore
  The sacre............