Excerpt from Nature in American Literature: Studies in the Modern View of Nature A land of promise, America is virtually without a past. Her children need not look far. Back to the founders of her civilization, 'a civilization not yet freed, and doubtless never to be freed, from its European prototype. The story of her culture - of her art, her philosophy, her educationmremains to this day an account of the transfer to a new world of the culture of modern Europe, modified, it is true, by the omission of an intimate sense of that august tradition which reaches back to the primitive Northern folks and the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, and by the addition of physical circumstances destined to affect profoundly her mind and heart. Elizabethan and Puritan in lin eage, America has approached maturity, has lived through her most impressionable years, in that con fused period of romanticism, democracy, and science from which the modern World has not yet emerged to clearness and faith. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.