Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/82

 Although not the kind expected, there were important results, among which was an extensive and interesting literature. In addition to a prose that has fed printing presses for a hundred years, the missionaries very definitely contributed poetry. This was of three kinds.

First were the songs in the hymn books and the juvenile poems in the nondescript school books, the former, by a combination of their rollicking swing and their reminiscent appeal, making fluid once more the sentiment that had crystalized so long in the breasts of the frontiersmen. That Dr. McLoughlin perhaps fell under the sway of the hymns as sung by the little Fort Vancouver half-breeds, has been suggested; much rougher men loved to listen ; and the Indians, for whose delectation Drake's unholy crew sang devout melodies, were still charmed by buoyant hymns in the time of the Methodists. In this way the missionaries were interpreters, promulgators and teachers of poetry; in this way they were effective workers on the appreciative side.

In the second place, they engaged to some extent in actual production, the natural result of an appreciation practiced long and sincerely enough. There were a few verse writers among the missionaries, including Mrs. Jason Lee.

Their third contribution had to a high degree an original quality. If Lowell could win renown by his use of dialect in The Biglow Papers, if Pope and Chapman could make a stir in the world with their Homers, then the missionaries, by their resourcefulness not only in putting English hymns into Chinook and the Nez