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FITZ-GREENE HALLECK (1790-1867)

The early years of the Republic produced few poets, and amid the general crudeness of the time and the real hunger for culture and for beauty the few poets that did appear were, as we see to-day, extravagantly over-rated. Undoubtedly the most over-rated of them all, not even excepting Willis and Percival, was Fitz-Greene Halleck, for a generation placed among the leaders of the American choir of singers. Slowly yet steadily has his fame decreased until to-day he holds but a hazardous place in the anthologies by reason of his once widely declaimed 'Marco Bozzaris' and the first stanza of his tribute to Drake. It is conventional to classify him with the Knickerbockers,' but he was of old Puritan stock, like Bryant, a native of Connecticut, and he spent almost the first quarter of a century of his life and nearly the last quarter of a century of it in the New England environment to which he belonged. During his active middle years he was in New York City, a clerk in the establishment of John Jacob Astor, arriving there in 1813 some five years after Irving and Paulding had amused the city with their Salmagundi papers. The newness and the excitement

of his first years in the metropolis and the enthusiasm of his new-found city friend, young Dr. Drake, stimulated him into a short period of poetic creation. With Drake he contributed a series of poetic effusions, signed Croaker' and 'Croaker & Co.,' to the New York Evening Post, a sort of poetic Salmagundi, the remarkable vogue of which bears testimony to the poetic leanness of the time. Spurred by the high spirits and the eager enthusiasm of his young friend Drake, he wrote his martial song Marco Bozzaris,' contributed the last stanza to Drake's 'American Flag,' and after the untimely death of the young poet mourned him in a quatrain that has passed into the universal currency of quotation. Castle,' his Burns' with a few distinctive lines, and his than one edition before its early readers were satisfied, Halleck's last years were barren of literary product.

His once greatly admired ‘Alnwick Fanny' that was published in more all seem lifeless and tawdry to-day.

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In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,

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The heartless luxury of the tomb; But she remembers thee as one Long loved and for a season gone; For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed, Her marble wrought, her music breathed; For thee she rings the birthday bells; Of thee her babe's first lisping tells; For thine her evening prayer is said At palace couch and cottage bed; Her soldier, closing with the foe, Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow; His plighted maiden, when she fears For him the joy of her young years, Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears; And she, the mother of thy boys, Though in her eye and faded cheek Is read the grief she will not speak, The memory of her buried joys, And even she who gave thee birth, Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,

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JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE (1795-1820)

The life of Joseph Rodman Drake has often been compared with that of the English poet Keats. Both were city born in the year 1795, both were poor and were self-educated; both studied medicine; and both, after a trip abroad in pursuit of health, died of consumption within a few months of the same date. Further than this, however, the comparison may not be pressed. The work of Drake is small and indistinctive when compared with the rich product of the English poet; though the ratio is not more disproportionate perhaps than is that between the literary London and the literary New York of the period.

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Drake was a young man of buoyant spirit, impetuous, sentimental, fanciful. He had read as richly even as Keats, but without Keats's brooding, sensuous soul. Like Irving and the Salmagundi group, he would plunge headlong into literature as if it were an exhilarating sport. He turned off verses with ease, never pausing to finish them, and he suffered from overpraise, as did Halleck. Instead of the sensuous beauty of the Greek that Keats put into his work, he put too often, as in his American Flag.' the spread-eagleism, and declamatory fervor of the new American nation. The Culprit Fay,' however, is in a different key. It is delicately fanciful, —an unlooked-for exotic in the somber field of American poetry, and it has a certain daintiness and beauty that within its limited field have been, even to the present day, rarely excelled, but it lacks the human interest and the imaginative power that a poem must have if it is to be rated with the great classics.

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And the flood which rolls its milky hue, 5
A river of light on the welkin blue.
The moon looks down on old Cronest,
She mellows the shades on his shaggy breast,
And seems his huge gray form to throw
In a silver cone on the wave below;
His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bough and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark
Glimmers and dies the fire-fly's spark-
Like starry twinkles that momently break 15
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest's
rack.

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Some on the backs of beetles fly

From the silver tops of moon-touched

trees,

Where they swung in their cobweb ham

mocks high,

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And rocked about in the evening breeze; Some from the hum bird's downy nest They had driven him out by elfin power And, pillowed on plumes of his rainbow breast,

Had slumbered there till the charmed hour;

Some had lain in the scoop of the rock,

With glittering ising-stars inlaid; 55 And some had opened the four-o'-clock

And stole within its purple shade. And now they throng the moonlight glade, Above below on every side,

Their little minim forms arrayed In the tricksy pomp of fairy pride!

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They come not now to print the lea,
In freak and dance around the tree,
Or at the mushroom board to sup,
And drink the dew from the buttercup;
A scene of sorrow awaits them now,
For an Ouphe has broken his vestal vow;
He has loved an earthly maid,
And left for her his woodland shade;
He has lain upon her lip of dew,
And sunned him in her eye of blue.
Fanned her cheek with his wing of air,
Played in the ringlets of her hair,
And, nestling on her snowy breast,
Forgot the lily-king's behest.
For this the shadowy tribes of air

To the elfin court must haste away:
And now they stand expectant there,
To hear the doom of the culprit Fay.

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And his peers were ranged around the throne.

He waved his scepter in the air,

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Is pure as the angel forms above, Gentle and meek, and chaste and kind, Such as a spirit well might love; Fairy! had she spot or taint, Bitter had been thy punishment Tied to hornet's shardy wings; Tossed on the pricks of nettle's stings; Or seven long ages doomed to dwell With the lazy worm in the walnut shell; Or every night to writhe and bleed Beneath the tread of the centipede, Or bound in a cobweb dungeon dim, Your jailer a spider huge and grim, 115 Amid the carrion bodies to lie,

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He looked around and calmly spoke; His brow was grave and his eye severe, But his voice in a softened accent broke:

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