XXXI. Non-English Writings I.
§ 2. Colonial Germans; Francis Daniel Pastorius.
The name Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–1719) begins the literary as well
as the historical annals of the Germans in America. Pastorius, in 1683 founder
of the first German settlement at Germantown, Pennsylvania, was a thorough scholar,
a university man, trained in theology and law. Mortified that Latin provided
a very inadequate preparation for the pioneer, he turned into service even the
meanest of his accomplishments, his clean and stately handwriting, which appears
in most of the documents of the new colony and most nobly in the first public
protest against negro slavery on record in America, made by the German Quakers
of Germantown in 1688. Pastorius’s familiarity with ancient and modern
languages is seen in his Hive or Beestock (Bienenstock, Melliotrophium), his
scrap-book of encyclopædic learning, in which historical, statistical,
and geographical materials are mingled with epigrams and verses in many languages.
More valuable is his description of Pennsylvania (Umständige geographische
Beschreibung der zu allerletzt erfundenen Provintz Pennsylvania, etc.), a collection
of letters and reports sent to his father and published by the latter in book
form. 1 The manuscript verse-collections, Voluptates Apianæ and Deliciæ
Hortenses reveal Pastorius as a cultivator of bees and flowers.“He who
never has a garden, and knows naught of flowers, and never looks back into the
earthly paradise,—he is but a slave and serf of the plough, and is accursed,”
said Pastorius the teacher, caring not solely for the progress of his pupils
in the three R’s or even in Latin, and fearing the engrossing materialism
of the pioneer’s existence. 2
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Note 1. The language of the people of the United States has been English even
more prevailingly than their institutions and their culture. Practically every
written tongue, however, is represented by newspapers designed for the use and
pleasure of the various language-groups among Americans, although only German,
French, and Yiddish may be said to show something like a special literature
of their own.—THE EDITORS