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[66]

Chapter 4: the revolution

If we turn, however, to the literature produced in America between the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, we perceive that it is a literature of discord and passion. Its spirit is not that of “one united people.” Washington could indeed declare in his Farewell address of 1796, “With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles” ; yet no one knew better than Washington upon what a slender thread this political unity had often hung, and how impossible it had been to foresee the end from the beginning.

It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period for the literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, of action rather than reflection, of the turning

New Haven. Yale University. Press. 1921.

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