less frequent. Such a circumlocution as the following could have been written only in his youth: That juice destructive to the pangs of care That charm whose virtue warms the world beside, The short and ugly word in this case was-grog. Yet in genuine poetic power Freneau did not display a growth corresponding to his improvement in technique. Two or three of his most famous shorter poems were composed after he was forty years of age, but the great promise of his youth was by no means fulfilled. There was a certain buoyant readiness of fancy in his early work, and at times there were fine moments of poetic fervor which gave hope of a genius that never came to full development. I see, I see A thousand kingdoms rais'd, cities, and men By forests shaded now runs weeping on, Nations shall grow and States not less in fame Our Alexanders, Pompeys, heroes, kings That in the womb of time yet dormant lye The college boy who wrote these lines fell upon evil days. The enmities he made in the period of controversy wreaked themselves on him in hostile and abusive criticism, and the dull drudgery of journalism blunted him. It is usually idle business to speculate on what a poet' might have done under different and more auspicious circumstances, but it is almost impossible not to believe that the drafting of Freneau into popular service prevented him from larger achievement; that the measure in which he was Poet of the Revolution decreased his claim to the title of Father of American Poetry. TIMOTHY DWIGHT (1752-1817) Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, was born in Northampton, Mass., May 14, 1752. After showing a childish precocity, not uncommon in his day, and almost equal to that of John Trumbull, he was given his bachelor's degree at Yale in 1769. During the next eight years of teaching and study, two in a New Haven grammar school, and six in Yale College, he gave himself so rigorously to the asceticism of the old-time scholar, that he permanently injured his health and his eyesight. In 17771778 he was chaplain in the Continental army. From 1778 to 1783 he lived in Northampton, farming and preaching, as well as serving two terms in the state legislature. It was during his service as Congregational pastor at Greenfield, Conn., that he published his three long poems mentioned below. From 1795 to his death in 1817 he was president of Yale College. He wrote voluminously on theological subjects, but his only other work of literary interest was his "Travels in New England and New York," 4 vols., posthumously published in 1823. 1. Texts. There are no recent editions of Dwight. The originals are: The Conquest of Canaan; A Poem in Eleven Books. Hartford, 1784. The Triumph of Infidelity: A Poem. Printed in the World, 1788. (No name given of place, author or publisher.) Greenfield Hill; A Poem, in Seven Parts. New York, 1794. II. Biography. Memoir prefixed to Dwight's "Theology," in 4 vols., by W. T. and S. E. Dwight. The Life of Timothy Dwight, in Vol. XIV of Sparks's “Library of American Biography," by W. B. Sprague. A Sketch in Vol. II of Sprague's "Annals of the American Pulpit." III. Criticism. Three Men of Letters, by M. C. Tyler, pp. 72-127. Introduction to the Poems of Philip Freneau, edited for the Princeton Historical Association, F. L. Pattee, Vol. I, pp. c, ci. Timothy Dwight wrote verse for about twenty years, although the dates of his chief publications fall close together between 1785 and 1794. He was an orthodox grandson of the last great champion of Calvinism, and so was naturally given to deep enthusiasms and lofty ambitions. When the war came on, he raised his voice in the chorus of patriotic song. Most of what he sung has been lost, but his one pæan, "Columbia," is among the best of American national lyrics. It was addressed to a nation in arms, who needed the comfort of an heroic appeal to the emotions. He left jocosity to Trumbull and Hopkinson, and diatribe to Freneau, while he sang with the prophetic zeal of the Puritan about the glories that were to be: Thus, as down a lone valley, with cedars o'erspread, The queen of the world, and the child of the skies!" But "Columbia" was by no means Dwight's first fervid national utterance. Though he was doomed to wait eleven years for publication, this "young Connecticut parson, thrilled through and through," had already poured "his enthusiasm into an epic of the wars of Joshua, done in the heroics of Pope." Although the English poet, Cowper, wrote a long and kindly review on the eleven books of "The Conquest of Canaan," Pro fessor Pattee is only a shade too severe on the output of Revolutionary epics: "There was no burst of song in America; instead, there followed one of the most pathetic spectacles in all literary history-a people with a vision that transported them into the clouds, yet powerless through environment and early education to transmute that vision into song. We see them, however, struggling heroically with the burden. From 1774, when Dwight completed his 'Conquest of Canaan,' 'the first piece of this kind ever attempted in this country,' as he observed in his preface, until 180[7], which ends the period with Barlow's 'Columbiad'-the 'Polyolbion' of American poetry-the years are strewn thick with the wrecks of epics. Charles Brockden Brown, when only sixteen, had started no less than three of these Homeric efforts; one on the discovery of America, and one each on the conquests of Mexico and Peru. It was our heroic era, but it yielded almost nothing of value. Mere exaltation availeth little unless it be grounded either upon genius or long-continued culture." "The Conquest of Canaan" was better, however, than "The Triumph of Infidelity," of which little good can be said. This was a prolonged attempt at scathing satire on the part of a man who had no native sense of humor. It is impossible that it can have amused anyone, though it doubtless gave grim satisfaction to other good folk who were no less devoted than he to old-fashioned orthodoxy. Far the best of Dwight's longer poems was "Greenfield Hill," published the year before he accepted the presidency of Yale. This poem had many such distinguished forerunners as Ben Jonson's "Penshurst," John Denham's "Cooper's Hill," and Pope's "Windsor Forest," the plan being simply to look out from some hilltop and derive a series of narrative and descriptive verse from what the views suggested. If the plan was an established one, Dwight's original scheme for working it out was even more frankly unoriginal, for he had at first, as the preface states, "designed to imitate, in the several parts, the manner of as many British poets, but finding himself too much occupied, when he projected the publication, to pursue that design, he relinquished it." This failure was altogether fortunate, for in the present form of the poem, Dwight's little flame shines stoutly from beneath the overshadowing bushels of Spenser, Thomson, Gay, Goldsmith, and others less easily recognizable. The whole is divided into seven parts, as follows: I, The Prospect; II, The Flourishing Village, "Fair Verna! loveliest village of the west"; III, The Burning of Fairfield, an attempt to consign to "the most finished detestation" the memory of Governor Tryon, who, in 1779, bombarded the village from Long Island Sound; IV, The Destruction of the Pequods, an heroic chapter in Connecticut history, narrated in Spenserian stanzas; V, The Clergyman's Advice to the Villagers, Mr. Dwight's pulpit ethics in verse; VI, The Farmer's Advice to the Villagers, delivered "on a pleasant monday," an admirable example, taken with Part V, of how the Lord's anointed could combine worldliness and other-worldliness, and VII, The Vision, or Prospect of the Future Happiness of America. Thus, in scale, the poem had a sort of pocket-epic magnitude with a concluding burst of loyalty, but F. L. Pattee, Introduction to "The Poems of Philip Freneau," Vól. I, pp. c and ci. it was genuinely local and concrete in character, and in point of view, as well as content, was essentially American. Even in the last part, where the temptation was greatest to identify the future of America with a vaguely glorious millennium, Dwight kept his head as he presented in rhythmic and sometimes poetical numbers the fair conclusions to be drawn from an honest survey of location, climate, property, government, and the advancement of the arts and sciences. "Greenfield Hill" is, therefore an interesting and readable document in literary history. It presents the workings of a sturdy, upright New England mind and conscience, its vigorous and narrow prejudices, its honest zeal for the country's good. It is very evidently an old document in some of its national concepts. It showed no prophetic sense of what the new industrialism and miscellaneous immigration were to bring about. In the remotest confines of Dwight's vista there was neither slum nor factory. But, if in this social blindness he seems remotely antiquated, he shared one other defect of vision with the America of only day before yesterday, for he was one of the earliest to rely on America's magnificent isolation: See this glad world remote from every foe, Here, without walls, the fields of safety spread, As poetry, it amounts to little more than "The Conquest of Canaan," or "The Triumph of Infidelity," but as a record of New England life and thought, it is immensely worth while, and deserves to be read side by side with an equally valuable treasure-house of fact and conviction, the four volumes of "Travels in New England and New York." To use a distinction of modern English politics, he was a conservative liberal, a compound of Yankee shrewdness and Puritan zeal. In the passage from the 18th century to the 19th he was a representative character who carried over the Calvinistic rectitude of Jonathan Edwards with the practical sagacity of Benjamin Franklin. He achieved no works or art, but he contributed to the collateral literature of American history, and stands out boldly in the history of American literature. JOEL BARLOW (1754-1813) Barlow was born in Redding, Conn., in 1754. He was graduated from Yale, after a year at Dartmouth, in 1778, reading a. Commencement poem on "The Prospect of Peace." From 1780 to 1783 he was chaplain in the Continental army. During this period, he brought to completion his "Vision of Columbus," which, after many delays, was published by subscription in 1787, and, twenty years later, appeared, revised and expanded, as "The Columbiad." Minor activities as a poet resulted in his official revision "Greenfield Hill," Part VII, lines 87-90. 2 Ibid., lines 321, 322. of the Book of Psalmody, in 1785; his participation, with Hopkins, Trumbull, and Humphreys, in "The Anarchiad," in 1786-1787; his “Hasty Pudding," in 1793, and his "Conspiracy of Kings," in 1796. These latter two were produced during his residence abroad, 1788-1805, when he became known, and was by many discredited, as a radical republican. His "Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government" (1792 and 1795), was fiercely condemned by all conservatives. In his latter years, however, he was in personal favor with Presidents Jefferson and Madison, who recognized him as an honest liberal. He lived until 1813. 1. Texts. His epic is accessible only in early editions. The Vision of Columbus. A Poem, in Nine Books. 1787. (Four more editions by 1794.) The Columbiad. A Poem in Ten Books. Philadelphia, 1807. (A sumptuous quarto of 454 pages, with twelve full-page steel engravings.) Hasty Pudding; a Poem in Three Cantos with a Memoir on Maize, by D. J. Browne. New York, 1847. II. Biography. Life and Letters of Joel Barlow, by C. B. Todd. New York, 1886. III. Criticism. Three Men of Letters, by M. C. Tyler, pp. 131-180. Barlow was the most ambitious, laborious, and persistent of the 18th century American aspirants to epic fame. His final product, "The Columbiad," appeared in 1807, nearly thirty years after the idea first occurred to him. In 1787 he published "a sketch of the present poem," under the title of "The Vision of Columbus,” a sketch which ran to the modest proportions of nine books and nearly 5,000 lines. In its final shape, it was not only poetically enlarged, but was accordingly magnified in an elaborately embellished quarto, in the fashion of the Baskerville reprints of the classics, then in polite English vogue. The poem, whose earlier name is the more exact, is really the old-age vision of Columbus as seen from a mountain-top, to which he is led by the Titan Hesper, guardian genius of the western world. To him is exhibited the conquest of South America, the settling of the colonies in North America, the French and Indian Wars in brief, and the War of the Revolution in prolonged detail. Then follow a hymn to peace, an arraignment of slavery in the land of liberty, and a survey of the progress of the arts in America. This would seem to have been enough of a vision for the downcast discoverer; but the reader is further enlightened by two more books, which contain what proves to be the Vision of Barlow as shared by Columbus. The latter is somewhat perplexed at the slow progress of science and the apparent persistency of international warfare, until Hesper, with great erudition and fine optimism, expounds the law |