BARTRAM'S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE 



The reasons for Bartram's influence on literature have been 

 amply suggested in the preceding chapters. In an age when 

 scientific eagerness and romantic interest in the remote and the 

 exotic quickened the literary imagination of Europe, it was inevi- 

 table that Bartram's book should produce a profound impres- 

 sion. Myra Reynolds has indicated the widespread interest in 

 Nature among the English poets of the eighteenth century, par- 

 ticularly in gardening, landscape, and travel.^ Bissell and Fair- 

 child have indicated an equally widespread interest in the 

 American Indian on the part of eighteenth-century English 

 writers generally.^ All these elements, nature, landscape, travel, 

 and Indians, are in Bartram's work. It is necessary to add, how- 

 ever, that, just as what is generally understood as the " Romantic 

 Movement " was not confined to England alone, so v/as Bar- 

 tram's popularity and hence his influence not confined to Eng- 

 land alone. His Travels ran through two editions in England 

 (1792, 1794), one in Ireland (1793), one in Germany (1793), 

 one in Holland (1797), and one in France (1799).' 



The extent of Bartram's influence on literature is not easily 

 determined. Many complicating elements enter into such a study. 

 Imaginative writers seldom leave their borrowings untransmuted 

 into something new and diff^erent; they may draw upon a num- 

 ber of sources in a single phrase; they may merely echo a mood 

 rather than a line or an epithet; and what may at first appear 

 as a borrowing may prove to be a coincidental similarity of 

 thought, phrase, or mood. In Bartram's case, however, there are 

 many definite references and acknowledgements to his Travels 

 in the work of many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- 

 century writers, and modern literary scholarship has amassed a 



^ The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope and Wordsworth. 

 Chicago, 1909. 



* Benjamin Bissell, op. cit.\ Hoxie Neale Fairchild, op. cit. 



" Professor Lane Cooper also reports having seen " other versions at Lund, 

 Stockholm, and Upsala " {Nation, LXXX, 152). 



127 



