Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/165

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Early Ministers and Missionaries 577 also well known as professors at the Philadelphia Academy, the parent of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1782 English papers published translations from its news columns, and in 1788 the paper had a considerable number of readers in Germany, facts which support the reputation of the editors Kunze and Helmuth for having established a good news service, and for having written the paper in a good German style, which the native German recognized as his own language. To the literature of the eighteenth century belong the ex- tensive reports and letters by Lutheran ministers in America to the church's fathers at home. Thus the Hallesche Nachrichten, addressed to the Lutheran ministeriunti in Halle, carefully written with minute details by the Rev. Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg, patriarch of the Lutheran church in America, and by other Lutheran ministers, give us an authentic picture not only of the beginnings and growth of the Lutheran Church in America but also of pioneer conditions in many of the colonies. Similarly the Urlsperger Nachrichten, addressed to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Urlsperger at Augsburg, give us an intimate view of the Salzburgers of Georgia and the beginnings of the Lutheran church in the South. The Diaries of Moravian Missiona- ries (Brothers Schnell, Gottschalk, and Spangenberg) , who visited the frontier settlements, travelling mostly on foot, from Western Pennsylvania, to the Valley of Virginia, and through trackless wastes to the western settlements of North Carolina, thence to the coast, in 1 743-1 748, are a wonderful record of modest courage and splendid sacrifice. Dark in colouring is the picture drawn by Gottlieb Mittelberger in his Reise nach Penn- sylvanien im Jahr 1750 und Riickreise 1754, in which the mis- forttmes of immigrants on the sea and their slavery on land is painted with terrifying realism. More judicial is AchenwaU in his Anmerkungen iiber Nordamerika (1769), or J. D. Schopf in his Reise durch einige der mittlern und siidlichen vereiniglen Staaten . . . in den Jahren 1783 und 1784. Very interesting are the letters of Hessian soldiers, who fought for the English king, found in Eelking, Schlozer's Briefwechsel, and elsewhere, • or the letters of the Baroness von Riedesel, the wife of the Bruns- wick general who was captured with Burgoyne at Saratoga. Her letters describe the whole of the disastrous British cam- » See Bibliography. VOL. IH — 37