American literature had no infancy.  That engaging naivete and that heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil.  Instead of emerging from the twilight of the past the first American writings were produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age.  Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial literature.  The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on imitating the cast-off literary fashions of the mother-country.  America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the greatest names in English literature.  Jamestown was planted in 1607, nine years before Shakespeare’s death, and the hero of that enterprise, Captain John Smith, may not improbably have been a personal acquaintance of the great dramatist.  “They have acted my fatal tragedies on the stage,” wrote Smith.  Many circumstances in The Tempest were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the Sea Venture on “the still vext Bermoothes,” as described by William Strachey in his True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1610.  Shakespeare’s contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the Polyolbion, addressed a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of “brave, heroic minds” who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize Virginia, an ode which ended with the prophecy of a future American literature: 

 “And as there plenty grows
  Of laurel every-where—­
  Apollo’s sacred tree—­
  You it may see
  A poet’s brows
  To crown, that may sing there.”

Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of the Civil Wars, had also prophesied in a similar strain: 

  “And who in time knows whither we may vent
    The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores . . . 
  What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
    May come refined with accents that are ours?”

It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, and Walter Raleigh might have been reckoned among the poets of America.  He was one of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, and he made voyages in person to Newfoundland and Guiana.  And more unlikely things have happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, who had sailed two years before.  Sir Henry Vane, the younger, who was afterward Milton’s friend—­

  “Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old”—­

came over in 1635, and was for a short time governor of Massachusetts.  These are idle speculations, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was prevented by the king’s officers, we may, for the nonce, “let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise,” and fancy by how narrow a chance Paradise Lost missed being written in Boston.  But, as a rule, the members of the literary guild are not quick to emigrate.  They like the feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, a state of society which America has only begun to reach during the present century.