Such forms, such deeds on Rafael’s tablets shine,
And such, O Trumbull, glow alike on thine.
David Bushnell of Saybrook had invented a submarine torpedo boat,
nicknamed “the American Turtle,” with which he undertook to blow up Lord
Admiral Howe’s gunship in New York harbor. Humphreys gives an account of
the failure of this enterprise in his “Life of Putnam.” It was some of
Bushnell’s machines, set afloat on the Delaware, among the British
shipping, that occasioned the panic celebrated in Hopkinson’s satirical
ballad, “The Battle of the Kegs,” which we used to declaim at school.
“See,” exclaims Dwight,—
See Bushnell’s strong creative genius, fraught
With all th’ assembled powers of skillful thought,
His mystic vessel plunge beneath the waves
And glide through dark retreats and coral caves!
Dr. Holmes, who knew more about Yale poets than they know about each
other, has rescued one line from “Greenfield Hill.” “The last we see of
snow,” he writes, in his paper on “The Seasons,” “is, in the language of
a native poet,
The lingering drift behind the shady wall.
This is from a bard more celebrated once than now, Timothy Dwight, the
same from whom we borrowed the piece we used to speak, beginning (as we
said it),
Columby, Columby, to glory arise!
The line with the drift in it has stuck in my memory like a feather in
an old nest, and is all that remains to me of his ‘Greenfield Hill.’”
* * * * *
As President of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, Dr. Dwight, by his
sermons, addresses, and miscellaneous writings, his personal influence
with young men, and his public spirit, was a great force in the
community. I have an idea that his “Travels in New England and New
York,” posthumously published in 1821–1822, in four volumes, will
survive all his other writings. I can recommend Dwight’s “Travels” as a
really entertaining book, and full of solid observation.
Of all the wooden poetry of these Connecticut bards, David Humphreys’s
seems to me the woodenest,—big patriotic verse essays on the model of
the “Essay on Man”; “Address to the Armies of the United States”; “On
the Happiness of America”; “On the Future Glory of the United States”;
“On the Love of Country”; “On the Death of George Washington,” etc. Yet
Humphreys was a most important figure. He was plenipotentiary to
Portugal and Spain, and a trusted friend of Washington, from whom,
perhaps, he caught that stately deportment which is said to have
characterized him. He imported a hundred merino sheep from Spain,
landing them from shipboard at his native Derby, then a port of entry on
the lordly Housatonic. He wrote a dissertation on merino sheep, and also
celebrated the exploit in song. The Massachusetts Agricultural Society
gave him a gold medal for his services in improving the native breed.
But if these sheep are even remotely responsible for Schedule K, it
might be wished that they had remained in Spain, or had been as the
flocks of Bo-Peep. Colonel Humphreys died at New Haven in 1818. The
college owns his portrait by Stuart, and his monument in Grove Street
cemetery is dignified by a Latin inscription reciting his titles and
achievements, and telling how, like a second Jason, he brought the
_auream vellerem_ from Europe to Connecticut. Colonel Humphreys’s works
were handsomely published at New York in 1804, with a list of
subscribers headed by their Catholic Majesties, the King and Queen of
Spain, and followed by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and numerous dukes
and chevaliers. Among the humbler subscribers I am gratified to observe
the names of Nathan Beers, merchant, New Haven; and Isaac Beers & Co.,
booksellers, New Haven (six copies),—no ancestors but conjecturally
remote collateral relatives of the undersigned.
I cannot undertake to quote from Humphreys’s poems. The patriotic
feeling that prompted them was genuine; the descriptions of campaigns in
which he himself had borne a part have a certain value; but the poetry
as such, though by no means contemptible, is quite uninspired. Homer’s
catalogue of ships is a hackneyed example of the way in which a great
poet can make bare names poetical. Humphreys had a harder job, and
passages of his battle pieces read like pages from a city directory.
As fly autumnal leaves athwart some dale,
Borne on the pinions of the sounding gale,
Or glides the gossamer o’er rustling reeds,
Bland’s, Sheldon’s, Moylan’s, Baylor’s battle steeds
So skimmed the plain. . . .
Then Huger, Maxwell, Mifflin, Marshall, Read,
Hastened from states remote to seize the meed;
* * * * *
While Smallwood, Parsons, Shepherd, Irvine, Hand,
Guest, Weedon, Muhlenberg, leads each his band.
Does the modern reader recognize a forefather among these heroic
patronymics? Just as good men as fought at Marathon or Agincourt. Nor
can it be said of any one of them _quia caret vate sacro_.
But the loudest blast upon the trump of fame was blown by Joel Barlow.
It was agreed that in him America had produced a supreme poet. Born at
Redding,—where Mark Twain died the other day,—the son of a farmer,
Barlow was graduated at Yale in 1778—just a hundred years before
President Taft. He married the daughter of a Guilford blacksmith, who
had moved to New Haven to educate his sons; one of whom, Abraham
Baldwin, afterwards went to Georgia, grew up with the country, and
became United States Senator.
After the failure of his Hartford journal, Barlow went to France, in
1788, as agent of the Scioto Land Company, which turned out to be a
swindling concern. He now “embraced French principles,” that is, became
a Jacobin and freethinker, to the scandal of his old Federalist friends.
He wrote a song to the guillotine and sang it at festal gatherings in
London. He issued other revolutionary literature, in particular an
“Advice to the Privileged Orders,” suppressed by the British government;
whereupon Barlow, threatened with arrest, went back to France. The
Convention made him a French citizen; he speculated luckily in the
securities of the republic, which rose rapidly with the victories of its
armies. He lived in much splendor in Paris, where Robert Fulton,
inventor of steamboats, made his home with him for seven years. In 1795,
he was appointed United States consul to Algiers, resided there two
years, and succeeded in negotiating the release of the American captives
who had been seized by Algerine pirates. After seventeen years’ absence,
he returned to America, and built a handsome country house on Rock
Creek, Washington, which he named characteristically “Kalorama.” He had
become estranged from orthodox New England, and lived on intimate terms
with Jefferson and the Democratic leaders, French sympathizers, and
philosophical deists.
In 1811 President Madison sent him as minister plenipotentiary to
France, to remonstrate with the emperor on the subject of the Berlin and
Milan decrees, which were injuring American commerce. He was summoned to
Wilna, Napoleon’s headquarters in his Russian campaign, where he was
promised a personal interview. But the retreat from Moscow had begun.
Fatigue and exposure brought on an illness from which Barlow died in a
small Polish village near Cracow. An elaborate biography, “The Life and
Letters of Joel Barlow,” by Charles Burr Todd, was published by G. P.
Putnam’s Sons in 1886.
Barlow’s most ambitious undertaking was the “Columbiad,” originally
printed at Hartford in 1787 as “The Vision of Columbus,” and then
reissued in its expanded form at Philadelphia in 1807: a sumptuous
quarto with plates by the best English and French engravers from designs
by Robert Fulton: altogether the finest specimen of bookmaking that had
then appeared in America. The “Columbiad’s” greatness was in inverse
proportion to its bigness. Grandiosity was its author’s besetting sin,
and the plan of the poem is absurdly grandiose. It tells how Hesper
appeared to Columbus in prison and led him to a hill of vision whence he
viewed the American continents spread out before him, and the panorama
of their whole future history unrolled. Among other things he saw the
Connecticut river—
Thy stream, my Hartford, through its misty robe,
Played in the sunbeams, belting far the globe.
No watery glades through richer vallies shine,
Nor drinks the sea a lovelier wave than thine.
It is odd to come upon familiar place-names swollen to epic pomp. There
is Danbury, for example, which one associates with the manufacture of
hats and a somewhat rowdy annual fair. In speaking of the towns set on
fire by the British, the poet thus exalteth Danbury, whose flames were
visible from native Redding:—
Norwalk expands the blaze; o’er Redding hills
High flaming Danbury the welkin fills.
Esopus burns, New York’s deliteful fanes
And sea-nursed Norfolk light the neighboring plains.
But Barlow’s best poem was “Hasty Pudding,” a mock-heroic after the
fashion of Philips’s “Cider,” and not, I think, inferior to that. One
couplet, in particular, has prevailed against the tooth of time:—
E’en in thy native regions how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush!
This poem was written in 1792 in Savoy, whither Barlow had gone to stand
as deputy to the National Convention. In a little inn at Chambéry, a
bowl of _polenta_, or Indian meal pudding, was set before him, and the
familiar dish made him homesick for Connecticut. You remember how Dr.
Holmes describes the dinners of the young American medical students in
Paris at the _Trois Frères_; and how one of them would sit tinkling the
ice in his wineglass, “saying that he was hearing the cowbells as he
used to hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight
from the huckleberry pasture in the old home a thousand leagues towards
the sunset.”