English was not the mother-tongue of all the colonists. For two or three generations there was a confusion of speech in the middle settlements. It is recorded of a certain young Dutchwoman from New Amsterdam, travelling to the English province of Connecticut, that she was in danger of being tried for witchcraft because she spoke a diabolical tongue, evidently marking her as "a child of Satan." But this polyglot period passed away, and the people in general spoke "the tongue that Shakespeare spoke,"-- spoke it indeed rather more literally than the English did, retaining old locutions like "I guess," and sprinkling their talk with "Sirs," and "Ma'ams,"--which have since come to be considered as Americanisms, whereas they are really Elizabethanisms. The possession of a language that is already consolidated, organized, enriched with a vast vocabulary, and dignified by literary use, has two effects. It makes the joyful and unconscious literature of adolescence, the period of popular ballads and rhymed chronicles, quaint animal-epics and miracle-plays, impossible. It offers to the literature of maturity an instrument of expression equal to its needs. But such a language carries with it discouragements as well as invitations. It sets a high standard of excellence. It demands courage and strength to use it in any but an imitative way. Do not misunderstand me here. The Americans, since that blending of experience which made them one people, have never felt that the English language was strange or foreign to them. They did not adopt or borrow it. It was their own native tongue. They grew up in it. They contributed to it. It belonged to them. But perhaps they hesitated a little to use it freely and fearlessly and originally while they were still in a position of tutelage and dependence. Perhaps they waited for the consciousness that they were indeed grown up,--a consciousness which did not fully come until after the War of 1812. Perhaps they needed to feel the richness of their own experience, the vigour of their own inward life, before they could enter upon the literary use of that most rich and vigorous of modern languages. Another reason why American literature did not develop sooner was the absorption of the energy of the people in other tasks than writing. They had to chop down trees, to build houses, to plough prairies. It is one thing to explore the wilderness, as Chateaubriand did, an elegant visitor looking for the materials of romance. It is another thing to live in the wilderness and fight with it for a living. Real pioneers are sometimes poets at heart. But they seldom write their poetry.