Outlines of English and American Literature | Page 4

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William Byrd
New Amsterdam (New York) in 1663
Cotton Mather
Jonathan Edwards
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin's Shop
Philip Freneau
Thomas Jefferson
Alexander Hamilton
Monticello, the Home of Jefferson in Virginia
Charles Brockden Brown
William Gilmore Simms
John Pendleton Kennedy
Washington Irving
"Sunnyside," Home of Irving
Rip Van Winkle
Old Dutch Church, Sleepy Hollow
William Cullen Bryant
Bryant's Home, at Cummington
James Fenimore Cooper
Otsego Hall, Home of Cooper
Cooper's Cave
Edgar Allan Poe
West Range, University of Virginia
The Building of the Southern Literary Messenger
"The Man" (Abraham Lincoln)
Birthplace of Longfellow at Falmouth (now Portland) Maine
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Taproom, Wayside Inn, Sudbury
Longfellow's Library in Craigie House, Cambridge
John Greenleaf Whittier
Oak Knoll, Whittier's Home, Danvers, Massachusetts
Street in Old Marblehead
James Russell Lowell
Lowell's House, Cambridge, in Winter
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Old Colonial Doorway
Sidney Lanier
The Village of McGaheysville, Virginia
Whitman's Birthplace, West Hills, Long Island
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson's Home, Concord
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Old Customhouse, Boston
"The House of the Seven Gables," Salem (built in 1669)
Hawthorne's Birthplace, Salem, Massachusetts
Henry Timrod
Paul Hamilton Hayne
Harriet Beecher Stowe
John Esten Cooke
Louisa M Alcott
Henry D Thoreau
Francis Parkman
Bret Harte
George W. Cable
Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
William Dean Howells
Mark Twain
Joel Chandler Harris
Edmund Clarence Stedman
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Joaquin Miller
John Fiske
Edward Everett Hale

OUTLINES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: AN ESSAY OF LITERATURE
(Not a Lesson, but an Invitation)
I sleep, yet I love to be wakened, and love to see The fresh young faces bending over me; And the faces of them that are old, I love them too, For these, as well, in the days of their youth I knew.
"Song of the Well"
WHAT IS LITERATURE? In an old English book, written before Columbus dreamed of a westward journey to find the East, is the story of a traveler who set out to search the world for wisdom. Through Palestine and India he passed, traveling by sea or land through many seasons, till he came to a wonderful island where he saw a man plowing in the fields. And the wonder was, that the man was calling familiar words to his oxen, "such wordes as men speken to bestes in his owne lond." Startled by the sound of his mother tongue he turned back on his course "in gret mervayle, for he knewe not how it myghte be." But if he had passed on a little, says the old record, "he would have founden his contree and his owne knouleche."
Facing a new study of literature our impulse is to search in strange places for a definition; but though we compass a world of books, we must return at last, like the worthy man of Mandeville's Travels, to our own knowledge. Since childhood we have been familiar with this noble subject of literature. We have entered into the heritage of the ancient Greeks, who thought that Homer was a good teacher for the nursery; we have made acquaintance with Psalm and Prophecy and Parable, with the knightly tales of Malory, with the fairy stories of Grimm or Andersen, with the poetry of Shakespeare, with the novels of Scott or Dickens,--in short, with some of the best books that the world has ever produced. We know, therefore, what literature is, and that it is an excellent thing which ministers to the joy of living; but when we are asked to define the subject, we are in the position of St. Augustine, who said of time, "If you ask me what time is, I know not; but if you ask me not, then I know." For literature is like happiness, or love, or life itself, in that it can be understood or appreciated but can never be exactly described. It has certain describable qualities, however, and the best place to discover these is our own bookcase.
[Sidenote: THE TREE AND THE BOOK]
Here on a shelf are a Dictionary, a History of America, a text on Chemistry, which we read or study for information; on a higher shelf are As You Like It, Hiawatha, Lorna Doone, The Oregon Trail, and other works to which we go for pleasure when the day's work is done. In one sense all these and all other books are literature; for the root meaning of the word is "letters," and a letter means a character inscribed or rubbed upon a prepared surface. A series of letters intelligently arranged forms a book, and for the root meaning of "book" you must go to a tree; because the Latin word for book, liber, means the inner layer of bark that covers a tree bole, and "book" or "boc" is the old English name for the beech, on whose silvery surface our ancestors carved their first runic letters.
So also when we turn the "leaves" of a book, our mind goes back over a long trail: through rattling printing-shop, and peaceful monk's cell, and gloomy cave with walls covered with picture writing, till the trail ends beside a shadowy forest, where primitive man takes a smooth leaf and inscribes his thought upon it by means of a pointed stick. A tree is the Adam of all books, and everything that