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Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 14 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 8 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 6 0 Browse Search
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters 4 0 Browse Search
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier 2 0 Browse Search
The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 7. (ed. John Greenleaf Whittier) 2 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters. You can also browse the collection for Defoe or search for Defoe in all documents.

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Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 2: the first colonial literature (search)
ry of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., vpon and from the islands of the Bermudas may or may not have given a hint to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in The Tempest. In either case it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker, the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a missionary of the present day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of the savage mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness and starvation, watched by those wild and cruel Pagans. John Pory, of the strong potations, who thinks that good company is the soul of this life, nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the crystal rivers and odoriferous woods by reflecting that he is escaping envy and expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace during a Virginia exile in continuing his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Colonel Norwood, an adventur
es, and he bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him as an ingenious, worthy young man, which obtained for him a position on the Pennsylvania magazine. Before he had been a year on American soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our political literature, Common sense, which appeared in January, 1776. A style hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic, wrote Edmund Randolph. Yet this style of familiar talk to the crowd had been used seventy years earlier by Defoe and Swift, and it was to be employed again by a gaunt American frontiersman who was born in 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's death. The crisis, a series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first was issued in December, 1776, seemed to justify the contemporary opinion that the American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the sword of Washington. Paine, who was now serving in the army, might have heard his own words, These are the times that try men's souls, read aloud, by Washingto