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"--