block-house, the son listening to the relation of his father with that sort of intenseness which would be created by a narrative that redounded so much to the honor of those whose names he had long revered for their courage and savage virtues.

"I had thought the Delawares a pacific people," said Duncan, "and that they never waged war in person; trusting the defence of their lands to those very Mohawks that you slew!"

"'Tis true in part," returned the scout, "and yet, at the bottom, 'tis a wicked lie. Such a treaty was made in ages gone by, through the deviltries of the Dutchers, who wished to disarm the natives that had the best right to the country, where they has ttled themselves. The Mohicans, though a part of the same nation, having to deal with the English, never entered into the silly bargain, but kept to their manhood; as in truth did the Delawares, when their eyes were opened to their folly. You see before you a chief of the great Mohican Sagamores! Once his family could chase their deer over tracks of country wider than that which belongs to the Albany Patterroon, without crossing brook or hill that was not their own; but what is left to their descendant! He may find his six feet of earth when God chooses, and keep it in peace, perhaps, if he has a friend who will take the pains to sink his head so low that the plowshares cannot reach it!"

Cooper's place is clear as a writer in the field of strictly legitimate romance-the romance of real life, of stirring adventure and daring deeds, made romantic simply by their inaccessibility to most men at most times. His kinship is with Scott and Stevenson and all large, healthy, out-of-door natures. Moreover, he has some claim to consideration among writers of universal interest in virtue of the elemental passions with which he deals, for the fashions of human heroism do not change. Had his insight and his art been equal to his idealizing imagination, he would have been second to no writer of modern romance. His old trapper stands upright in the deathhour and answers "Here" as Colonel Newcome answers "Adsum!" David Gaunt goes forth to battle like David of old, with a sling in his hand and a song on his lips. The mourning of the Delawares over the body of Uncas reminds

us of the mourning of the Trojans over the body of Hector. Leather-Stocking straps the aged Chingachgook on his back and carries him out of the forest-fire as Eneas carried Anchises out of burning Troy. Indeed, the fundamental conception of Leather-Stocking and his rifle Kill-deer suggests a comparison with Odysseus and his bow or King Arthur and his good sword Excalibur. But we may not make the comparison. We can only deplore the fatal defects that marred a genius which might otherwise have set at the beginning of our literature an epic worthy to stand by the epics of the old world.

EARLY POETRY

That the genius of poetry in America was even more slow to respond to the creative impulse than the genius of prose romance, is made evident by the story of the publication of Bryant's Thanatopsis. When, in 1817, the manuscript of that poem appeared in the office of the North American Review of Boston-a magazine then but two years old, yet already a criterion of literary taste-it caused no little commotion. Mr. Dana, the most sagacious of the young editors, declared that it could not have been written in America, and would consent to publish it only upon the mistaken assurance of his colleague that Dr. Bryant, the poet's father, then at Boston as senator to the state legislature, was its author. Nor was Mr. Dana's caution unjustified. It is true that nothing could be greatly better in its modest way than Freneau's Wild Honeysuckle, written long before, but it is also true that that lyric was, as one of its admirers has called it, little more than a "first stammer. American poetry became fairly articulate only with Thanatopsis. But the young author of 1817 was still quite unknown to fame, and the part that he was to play in American poetry reaches so far through the nineteenth cen

*Greenough White: Philosophy of American Literature.

tury that it will be well here, before considering him, to glance at a few of his contemporaries whose work was associated exclusively with the early decades.

Washington Allston, 1779-1843.

John Pier

pont, 1785-1866.

There is perhaps little to keep alive in literary history the names of such men as Washington Allston and John Pierpont except the fact that they published collections of poetry before Bryant. Allston, who is remembered still as a painter, studied art abroad, and had the good fortune while at Rome to become intimate with Coleridge. At Boston, where he resided, he exercised a deep influence upon early art and culture in New England. He published a volume of refined verse, The Sylphs of the Seasons, in 1813. Pierpont, who was a Unitarian clergyman of Connecticut, published several volumes of poems, the first in 1816. Many of his verses, such as Warren's Address to the American Soldiers ("Stand! the ground's your own, my braves!"), had a touch of grandiloquence in them that made them favorites for recitation. The spirit of the Revolution survived long in poetry of this nature.

Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck, whose names are inseparably associated, and who belonged to the New York group of writers, are two minor poets still held in something like affectionate remembrance. Drake, the younger, showed perhaps the greater promise, but he died of consumption at the age of twenty-five. He was a youth of many graces of both body and mind, who wrote verses as a bird sings, for the pure joy of it. His fame, as well as Halleck's, was made by what was locally known as "The Croakers". -a series of forty poems contributed by them in 1819 to the New York Evening Post, and signed "Croaker and Co." Among these was The American Flag ("When Freedom from her mountain height"),

Joseph Rodman Drake, 1795-1820.

probably the most widely known of our patriotic poems, though it is too declamatory in tone to be given high praise. The last four lines were written by Halleck:

"Forever float that standard sheet!

Where breathes the foe but falls before us?

With freedom's soil beneath our feet,

And freedom's banner streaming o'er us!"

They are not made readily clear even by careful punctuation, and it is a pity that the finer lines of Drake's were not allowed to stand, in spite of their concluding hyperbole:

"As fixed as yonder orb divine,

That saw thy bannered blaze unfurled,
Shall thy proud stars resplendent shine,
The guard and glory of the world."

Drake's longest poem is The Culprit Fay, which was published in a volume of selected poems ten years after his death.* It is the story of a fairy who is compelled to do penance for his sinful love of a mortal. The scene is laid in the highlands of the Hudson. It is an airy work of fancy in the

manner of Scott and Moore, whose poems were just then at the height of popularity. Like their poems, too, it undeniably

* The poem was written hastily, and grew out of a conversation with Cooper and Halleck over the possibility of giving old world romance a new world setting. The date commonly given is 1819. Halleck's biographer produces what appears to be incontrovertible evidence that the date should be 1816. Yet Cooper did not move to the neighborhood of New York City until 1817. Moreover, the poem contains these lines:

"Joy to thee, Fay! thy task is done,

Thy wings are pure, for the gem is won."

It is difficult to believe that these lines were written before the appearance of Moore's Lalla Rookh, which was published in the spring of 1817, and which has, at the conclusion of Paradise and the Peri, these lines:

"Joy, joy forever!-my task is done

The Gates are passed, and Heaven is won!"

Besides, the tasks set the culprit fay are not unlike the tasks set the fallen Peri.

owes much to Coleridge's Christabel in melody and imagery, the two qualities into which most of the merits of Drake's poem resolve themselves:

Fitz-Greene Halleck, 1790-1867.

"The stars are on the moving stream,
And fling, as its ripples gently flow,
A burnished length of wavy beam

In an eel-like, spiral line below;
The winds are whist and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid,
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katydid,

And the plaint of the waiting whip-poor-will,
Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings,
Ever a note of wail and woe,

Till morning spreads her rosy wings,

And earth and sky in her glances glow."

Halleck was not of New York City by birth, but went thither from his Connecticut home in 1811, and spent nearly forty years there as an accountant, writing verse between whiles when the mood prompted. He rarely wrote with sufficient seriousness for entire success, some caprice of humor or cynicism frequently leading him to lower the tone and spoil the effect of an otherwise fine poem. His best work was done in his youth when, like Drake, he came under the spell of the popular British poets, in his case particularly Campbell and Byron. Fanny, his longest poem, which belongs to the same year as his Croaker contributions, and which was written in Byron's satirical vein, though without any of the abiding elements of Byron's work, was immensely popular in its day. A tender monody on Burns and a spirited apostrophe to Red Jacket, chief of the Tuscaroras, also deserve mention. But Halleck lives for us in two poems only-the martial Marco Bozzaris, celebrating the deeds