Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/160

CHAPTER XXXI Non-English Writings I German, French, Yiddish' I. German THE memoirs, poems, and essays, the books of travel, fiction, and science that have been written in the Ger- man language in the United States, are of greater histor- ical than literary interest. Their value consists in their record of human experience, mainly that of pioneers whose labours were devoted to the present, whose hopes lay in the future, yet whose meditations lingered fondly with the past. Three periods can readily be distinguished : that of the eighteenth cen- tury, in which religious writing predominated; that of the nine- teenth century before i860, the period of political idealism; and lastly, continuous from i860, what may be called the period of opportunity. The two later periods in many instances overlap. The name Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651-1719) begins the literary as well as the historical annals of the Germans in America. Pastorius, in 1683 founder of the first German settle- ment at Germantown, Pennsylvania, was a thorough scholar, a university man, trained in theology and law. Mortified that Latin provided a very inadequate preparation for the pioneer, he turned into service even the meanest of his accomplishments, his clean and stately handwriting, which appears in most of the documents of the new colony and most nobly in the first public ' The language of the people of the United States has been English even more prevailingly than their institutions and their culture. Practically every written tongue, however, is represented by newspapers designed for the use and pleasure of the various language-groups among Americans, although only German, French, and Yiddish may be said to show something like a special literature of their own. — ^The Editors. 572