Outlines of English and American Literature | Page 4

Oswald's Church, Grasmere
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Coleridge Cottage, Nether Stowey, Somersetshire
Robert Southey
Greta Hall, in the Lake Region
Lord Byron
Newstead Abbey and Byron Oak
The Castle of Chillon
Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats
Leigh Hunt
Walter Scott
Abbotsford
The Great Window, Melrose Abbey
Scott's Tomb in Dryburgh Abbey
Mrs. Hannah More
Charles Lamb
East India House, London
Mary Lamb
The Lamb Building, Inner Temple, London
Thomas De Quincey
Dove Cottage, Grasmere
Tennyson's Birthplace, Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire
Alfred Tennyson
Summerhouse at Farringford
Robert Browning
Mrs. Browning's Tomb, at Florence
The Palazzo Rezzonico, Browning's Home in Venice
Piazza of San Lorenzo, Florence

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Matthew Arnold
The Manor House of William Morris
William Morris
Charles Dickens
Gadshill Place, near Rochester
Dickens's Birthplace, Landport, Portsea
Yard of Reindeer Inn, Danbury
The Gatehouse at Rochester, near Dickens's Home
William Makepeace Thackeray
Charterhouse School
George Eliot
Griff House, George Eliot's Early Home in Warwickshire
Charlotte Brontë
Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell
Richard Doddridge Blackmore
Robert Louis Stevenson
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Carlyle
Carlyle's House, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London

Arch Home, Ecclefechan
John Ruskin
Entrance to "Westover," Home of William Byrd
Plymouth in 1662. Bradford's House on Right
William Byrd
New Amsterdam (New York) in 1663
Cotton Mather
Jonathan Edwards
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin's Shop
Philip Freneau
Thomas Jefferson
Alexander Hamilton
Monticello, the Home of Jefferson in Virginia
Charles Brockden Brown
William Gilmore Simms
John Pendleton Kennedy
Washington Irving
"Sunnyside," Home of Irving
Rip Van Winkle

Old Dutch Church, Sleepy Hollow
William Cullen Bryant
Bryant's Home, at Cummington
James Fenimore Cooper
Otsego Hall, Home of Cooper
Cooper's Cave
Edgar Allan Poe
West Range, University of Virginia
The Building of the Southern Literary Messenger
"The Man" (Abraham Lincoln)
Birthplace of Longfellow at Falmouth (now Portland) Maine
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Taproom, Wayside Inn, Sudbury
Longfellow's Library in Craigie House, Cambridge
John Greenleaf Whittier
Oak Knoll, Whittier's Home, Danvers, Massachusetts
Street in Old Marblehead
James Russell Lowell
Lowell's House, Cambridge, in Winter
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Old Colonial Doorway
Sidney Lanier
The Village of McGaheysville, Virginia
Whitman's Birthplace, West Hills, Long Island
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson's Home, Concord
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Old Customhouse, Boston
"The House of the Seven Gables," Salem (built in 1669)
Hawthorne's Birthplace, Salem, Massachusetts
Henry Timrod
Paul Hamilton Hayne
Harriet Beecher Stowe
John Esten Cooke
Louisa M Alcott
Henry D Thoreau
Francis Parkman
Bret Harte
George W. Cable
Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

William Dean Howells
Mark Twain
Joel Chandler Harris
Edmund Clarence Stedman
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Joaquin Miller
John Fiske
Edward Everett Hale

OUTLINES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: AN ESSAY OF LITERATURE
(Not a Lesson, but an Invitation)
I sleep, yet I love to be wakened, and love to see The fresh young faces
bending over me; And the faces of them that are old, I love them too,
For these, as well, in the days of their youth I knew.
"Song of the Well"
WHAT IS LITERATURE? In an old English book, written before
Columbus dreamed of a westward journey to find the East, is the story
of a traveler who set out to search the world for wisdom. Through
Palestine and India he passed, traveling by sea or land through many
seasons, till he came to a wonderful island where he saw a man
plowing in the fields. And the wonder was, that the man was calling
familiar words to his oxen, "such wordes as men speken to bestes in his

owne lond." Startled by the sound of his mother tongue he turned back
on his course "in gret mervayle, for he knewe not how it myghte be."
But if he had passed on a little, says the old record, "he would have
founden his contree and his owne knouleche."
Facing a new study of literature our impulse is to search in strange
places for a definition; but though we compass a world of books, we
must return at last, like the worthy man of Mandeville's Travels, to our
own knowledge. Since childhood we have been familiar with this noble
subject of literature. We have entered into the heritage of the ancient
Greeks, who thought that Homer was a good teacher for the nursery;
we have made acquaintance with Psalm and Prophecy and Parable,
with the knightly tales of Malory, with the fairy stories of Grimm or
Andersen, with the poetry of Shakespeare, with the novels of Scott or
Dickens,--in short, with some of the best books that the world has ever
produced. We know, therefore, what literature is, and that it is an
excellent thing which ministers to the joy of living; but when we are
asked to define the subject, we are in the position of St. Augustine, who
said of time, "If you ask me what time is, I know not; but if you ask me
not, then I know." For literature is like happiness,