[5] of this work, but will rather attempt to select, as time selects, the best or representative names of each period in its course. The intrinsic literary importance of these writers will be considered, rather than their merely historical importance. Many minor names, therefore, which might properly be included in a summary of respectable books hitherto produced in America are here omitted altogether; and others are given such minor mention as their literary merit appears to warrant.
Pure literature.
But it is time, you may say, to define more specifically what literature is. No definition of it ever yet given has surpassed that magnificent Latin sentence of Bacon's which one marvels never to have seen quoted among the too scanty evidences that he wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare :--It [literature] hath something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the show of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do. De Augmentis, Book II.It is only literature then, in Bacon's definition, which truly “raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity.” All else is reason (or reasoning) and history (or narrative).
