"Humphreys charmed the listening throng;
Sweetly he sang amid the clang of arms."
At Washington's head-quarters in Peekskill he composed "An Address to
the Armies of the United States." It was recited publicly in London, and
translated by Chastellux into French prose. Three years later he
published a poem on the "Happiness of America," which ran through ten
editions. In it the gallant man-at-rhymes tells the story of his own
campaigns:--
"From whom I learnt the martial art;
With what high chiefs I played my early part:
With Parsons first, whose eye with piercing ken
Reads through their hearts the characters of men.
Then how I aided in the following scene
Death-daring Putnam, then immortal Greene.
Then how great Washington my youth approved,
In rank preferred and as a parent loved;
(For each fine feeling in his bosom blends,--
The first of heroes, sages, patriots, friends!)
With him what hours on warlike plans I spent
Beneath the shadow of th' imperial tent;
With him how oft I went the nightly round
Through moving hosts, or slept on tented ground;
From him how oft (nor far below the first
In high behests and confidential trust,)--
From him how oft I bore the dread commands
Which destined for the fight the eager bands;
With him how oft I passed th' eventful day,
Rode by his side as down the long array
His awful voice the columns taught to form,
To point the thunders and to pour the storm."
This extract will give a fair idea of the Colonel's manner. A poem on
"The Future Glory of the United States of America," another on "The
Industry of the United States of America," and "The Death of General
Washington," make up his credentials to a seat on the American
Parnassus.
Joel Barlow, "Virgilian Barlow," is the most remarkable of the cluster.
He started in the race of life with ten competitors of his own blood,
and came in a successful adventurer in both hemispheres. After serving
in the army with musket and prayer-book, he practised law, edited a
newspaper, kept a book-shop,--and having exhausted the variety of
callings offered by Connecticut, went to France as agent for the Scioto
Land Company, and opened an office in Paris with a grand flourish of
advertisements. "Farms for sale on the banks of the Ohio, _la belle
rivière_; the finest district of the United States! Healthful and
delightful climate; scarcely any frost in winter; fertile soil; a
boundless inland navigation; magnificent forests of a tree from which
sugar flows; excellent fishing and fowling; venison in abundance; no
wolves, lions, or tigers; no taxes; no military duty. All these
unexampled advantages offered to colonists at five shillings the acre!"
The speculation took well. Nothing was talked of but the free and rural
life to be led on the banks of the Scioto. Brissot's foolish book on
America confirmed the promises of Barlow, and stimulated the ardor of
purchasers.
The Scioto Company turned out to be a swindling land-company, the
precursor of many that have resembled it. The lands they offered had
been bought of the Ohio Company, but were never paid for. When the poor
French barbers, fiddlers, and bakers, as they are called in a
contemporary narrative, reached the banks of _la belle rivière_, they
found that their title-deeds were good for nothing, and that the woods
produced savages instead of sugar. Some died of privation, some were
scalped, and some found their way to New Orleans. The few who remained
eventually obtained a grant of a few acres from the Ohio Company, by
paying for them over again.
In the mean time the French Revolution had broken out, and Barlow saw
the visions and dreamed the dreams of the enthusiasts of that day. He
dropped the land business, and he dropped his New England prejudices,
religious as well as political, and his New England common sense.
Connecticut men who wander into other lands and other opinions seem
peculiarly subject to such violent transformations. Some of the most
ignivorous of our Southern countrymen are the offspring of Connecticut;
and, strange as it may appear, the sober land of the pumpkin and onion
exports more arbiters of elegance and punctilio, more judges without
appeal of horses, wine, and beauty, more gentlemen of the most sensitive
and demonstrative honor, than any other Northern State.
Inspired by the instincts of his race, Barlow fancied he saw the
approach of a new era of perfection. To hasten its advent in England, he
translated Volney's "Ruins," and went to London to publish his
translation. There he wrote his "Advice to the Privileged Classes," a
political pamphlet, and became an active member of the Constitution
Society. The Society commissioned him as delegate to the French
Convention, with an address of congratulation and a gift of a thousand
pairs of shoes. The Convention rewarded him with the dignity of _Citoyen
Francais_. Barlow adopted the character, and carried it out. He sang at
a supper a parody of "God save the King," composed by himself.
"Fame, let thy trumpet sound!
Tell all the world around
How Capet fell!
And when great George's poll
Shall in the basket roll,
Let mercy then control
The Guillotine!
"God save the Guillotine,
Till England's King and Queen
Her power shall prove;
When all the sceptred crew
Have paid their homage to
The Guillotine!"
A few years before, Barlow had dedicated the "Vision of Columbus" to
poor Capet, whose destruction he celebrates so pleasantly,--with many
assurances of the gratitude of America, and of his own veneration.
"_Coelum, non animum_," would never have been written, if Horace had
properly understood Connecticut character.
Barlow's zeal was pleasing to the rulers of France. They sent him and
the Abbé Grégoire to revolutionize Savoy, and to divide it into
departments. After his return, he became rich by speculation, and lived
handsomely in the Hotel de Clermont-Tonnerre. His reputation extended to
his own country. The United States employed him to negotiate with the
Barbary pirates,--that is to say, to buy off the wretched cutthroats who
infested the Mediterranean. He went to Africa, and made arrangements
which were considered advantageous then, and would be hooted at as
disgraceful now. In the treaty with Algiers occurred a passage that gave
great offence to his friends at home, and to Federalists in general. It
was to this effect, if not in these words: "That the government of the
United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
In 1805, after seventeen years of absence, Barlow returned to America,
built himself a house near Washington, and called it Kalorama. Jefferson
and the Democrats received him with open arms; he embraced them with
equal warmth, and was a very great man for some time. A new edition of
the "Columbiad" completed his fame,--an edition gotten up at his own
expense, with engravings by his friend Robert Fulton; the paper, type,
illustrations, and binding, far superior to anything as yet produced by
American publishers. At the request of the President, Barlow went back
to France as Minister, in the place of General Armstrong. It was the
winter of the Russian campaign. A personal interview with the Emperor on
the subject of the Berlin and Milan Decrees seemed necessary, and Barlow
hurried to Wilna to meet him. The weather was unusually severe, the
roads rough, and the accommodations wretched. Cold and exposure brought
on a violent illness; and Barlow expired in a miserable hut near Cracow.
The "Columbiad" is an enlargement, or rather a dilution, of the "Vision
of Columbus," by the addition of some two thousand verses. The epic
opens with Columbus in prison; to him enters Hesper, an angel. The angel
leads Columbus to the Mount of Vision, whence he beholds the panorama of
the Western Continent he had discovered. Hesper acts as showman, and
explains the tableaux as they roll on. He points out the geographical
features of America, not forgetting Connecticut River; relates the
history of Mexico and of Peru, and explains the origin of races,
cautioning Columbus against the theory of several Adams. Turning north,
he describes the settlement of the English colonies, and narrates the
old French War of General Wolfe and the American Revolution, with the
customary episodes,--Saratoga, Yorktown, Major André, Miss McCrea, and
the prison-ships. Finally, the angel predicts the glory of the world's
future,--perpetual peace, unrestricted commerce, public works, health
and longevity, one universal language. The globe, "one confederate,
independent sway," shall
"Spread with the sun, and bound the walks of day;
One central system, one all-ruling soul,
Live through the parts, and regulate the whole."
There is evidently no room for the serpent Secession in Barlow's
paradise. This grand federation of the terrestrial ball is governed by a
general council of elderly married men, "long rows of reverend sires
sublime," presided over by a "sire elect shining in peerless grandeur."
The delegates hold their sessions in Mesopotamia, within a "sacred
mansion" of high architectural pretensions.
"On rocks of adamant the walls ascend,
Tall columns heave, and sky-like arches bend;
Bright o'er the golden roof the glittering spires
Far in the concave meet the solar fires;
Four blazing fronts, with gates unfolding high,
Look with immortal splendor round the sky."
In the spacious court of the capitol of the world stands the statue of
the Genius of Earth, holding Truth's mighty mirror in his hand. On the
pedestal are carved the noblest arts of man. Beneath the footstool of
the Genius,
"all destructive things,
The mask of priesthood and the mace of kings,
Lie trampled in the dust; for here, at last,
Fraud, folly, error, all their emblems cast.
Each envoy here unloads his weary hand
Of some old idol from his native land.
One flings a pagod on the mingled heap;
One lays a crescent, one a cross to sleep;
Swords, sceptres, mitres, crowns and globes and stars,
Codes of false fame and stimulants to wars,
Sink in the settling mass. Since guile began,
These are the agents of the woes of man."
It will be observed that Barlow improved slightly upon the old loyalist
cry, "_Une loi, un roi, une foi._" One government, one reverend sire
elect, and no religion, was his theory of the future of mankind.
Few men in these degenerate days have the endurance to read the
"Columbiad" through; but "Hasty Pudding," which Barlow celebrated in
verse as good sound republican diet, may be read with some pleasure. It
belongs to the same class of poems as Philips's "Cider," Dyer's
"Fleece," and Grainger's "Sugar-Cane," and is quite as good as most of
them.
There is little to be said about Alsop. He was a scholarly gentleman,
who published a few mild versions from the Italian and the Scandinavian,
and a poem on the "Memory of Washington," and was considerate enough not
to publish a poem on the "Charms of Fancy," which still exists, we
believe, in manuscript. In some verses extracted from it by the editors
of the "Cyclopædia of American Literature" we recognize with interest
that traveller of the future who is to moralize over the ruins of the
present,--known to all readers as Macaulay's New-Zealander, although
Goldsmith, Kirke White, and others had already introduced him to the
public. Alsop brings this Wandering Jew of literature from Nootka Sound
to gaze on "many a shattered pile and broken stone," where "fair
Bostonia," "York's proud emporium," or Philadelphia, "caught the
admiring gaze."
The wild-eyed, excitable Dr. Hopkins had more vigor and originality than
his brother stars. There is much rough humor in his burlesque of the
essay of Brackenridge of Pittsburg on the Indian War:--
"As if our God
One single thought on Indians e'er bestowed;
To them his care extends, or even knew,
Before Columbus told him, where they grew";
and in his epitaph on the "Victim of a Cancer Quack":--
"The case was this:--a pimple rose
Southeast a little of his nose,
Which daily reddened and grew bigger,
As too much drinking gave it vigor";
and in the "Hypocrite's Hope":--
"Blest is the man who from the womb
To saintship him betakes;
And when too soon his child shall come,
A long confession makes";
and in the squib on Ethan Allen's infidel book:--
"Lo! Allen 'scaped from British jails,
His tushes broke by biting nails,
Appears in hyperborean skies,
To tell the world the Bible lies."
Dr. Hopkins published very little; he might be excused, if he had
written more.
Addison said, he never yet knew an author who had not his admirers. The
Connecticut authors were no exception to this rule. To begin with, they
admired themselves, and they admired one another; each played squire to
his gifted friend, and sounded the trumpet of his fame. It was, "See!
Trumbull leads the train," or "the ardent throng"; "Trumbull! earliest
boast of Fame"; "Lo! Trumbull wakes the lyre."
"Superior poet, in whose classic strain
In bright accordance wit and fancy reign;
Whose powers of genius in their ample range
Comprise each subject and each tuneful change,
Each charm of melody to Phoebus dear,
The grave, the gay, the tender, the severe."
Barlow is "a Child of Genius"; Columbus owes much of his glory to him.
"In Virgilian Barlow's tuneful lines
With added splendor great Columbus shines."
Then we have "Majestic Dwight, sublime in epic strain"; "Blest Dwight";
Dwight of "Homeric fire." Colonel Humphreys is fully up to the
regulation standard:--
"In lore of nations skilled and brave in arms,
See Humphreys glorious from the field retire,
Sheathe the glad sword and string the sounding lyre."
Dwight thought "McFingal" much superior to "Hudibras"; and Hopkinson,
the author of "Hail Columbia," mentions, as a melancholy instance of
æsthetic hallucination, that Secretary Wolcott, whose taste in
literature was otherwise good, had an excessive admiration for "The
Conquest of Canaan." A general chorus of neighbors and friends rose in
the columns of the "Connecticut Magazine and New Haven Gazette":--"It is
with a noble and patriotic pride that America boasts of her Barlow,
Dwight, Trumbull, and Humphreys, the poetical luminaries of
Connecticut"; and all true New-Englanders preferred their home-made
verses to the best imported article. The fame of the Seven extended into
the neighboring States; Boston, not yet the Athens of America, confessed
"that Pegasus was not backed by better horsemen from any part of the
Union." But the glory grew fainter as the distance increased from the
centre of illumination. In New York, praise was qualified. The Rev.
Samuel Miller of that city, who published in 1800 "A Brief Retrospect of
the Literature of the Eighteenth Century," calls Mr. Trumbull a
respectable poet, thinks that Dr. Dwight's "Greenfield Hill" is entitled
to considerable praise, and finds much poetic merit in Mr. Barlow's
"Vision"; but he closes the chapter sadly, with a touch of Johnson's
vigor:--"The annals of American literature are short and simple. The
history of poverty is usually neither very various nor very
interesting." Farther South the voice of the scoffer was heard. Mr.
Robert Morris ventured to say in the Assembly of Pennsylvania, that
America had not as yet produced a good poet. Great surprise and
indignation, when this speech reached the eyes of the Connecticut men!
Morris might understand banking, but in taste he was absurdly deficient.
No poets! What did he call John Trumbull of Hartford, and Joel Barlow,
author of "The Vision of Columbus"? "We appeal to the bar of taste,
whether the writings of the poets now living in Connecticut are not
equal to anything which the present age can produce in the English
language."
Cowper showed excellent sense when he wrote,--"Wherever else I am
accounted dull, let me at least pass for a genius at Olney." The
Hartford Wits passed for geniuses in Connecticut, which is better, as
far as the genius is concerned, than any extent or duration of
posthumous fame. Let their shades, then, be satisfied with the good
things in the way of praise they received in their lives; for between us
and them there is fixed a great gulf of oblivion, into which Time, the
merciless critic from whose judgment there is no appeal, has tumbled
their works.
In 1793, a volume of "American Poems, Selected and Original," was
published in Litchfield by subscription. A second volume was promised,
if the first met with "that success which the value of the poems it
contained seemed to warrant"; but no second volume appeared. When
Hopkins died, in 1801, the constellation was sinking fast to the
horizon; a few years later it had set, and only elderly inhabitants
remembered when the Down-Eastern sky was made bright by it. Barlow's
magnificent edition revived the recollection for a time, and the old
defiant cry was raised again, that the "Columbiad" was comparable, not
to say superior, to any poem that had appeared in Europe since the
independence of the United States. But English reviewers refused to
chime in. Their critical remarks were not flattering, although merciful
as compared with the jeers of the "Edinburgh" at Byron's "Hours of
Idleness," or the angry abuse with which the earlier productions of the
Lake School were received. Nevertheless, Paulding, Ingersoll, and Walsh,
indignant, sprang to their quills, and attacked the prejudiced British
with the _argumentum ad hominem_, England's "sores and blotches," etc.;
the _argumentum Tu quoque_, "We're as good a poet as you are, and a
better, too"; and, lastly, pleaded minority in bar of adverse criticism,
"We are a young nation," and so on. This was to yield the point. If a
young nation necessarily writes verses similar in quality to those of
very young persons, it would always be proper to take Uncle Toby's
advice, "and say no more about it." Deaf to Walsh's "Appeal," and to
Inchiquin's "Letters," Sydney Smith, as late as January, 1820, asked, in
the "Edinburgh," that well-known and stinging question, "In the four
quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" Even at home,
"Hesper" and "The Mount of Vision" soon faded out of sight. At that
time, 1808-1810, readers of verse had, not to mention Cowper, "The Lay
of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion," "Gertrude of Wyoming," "Thalaba,"
Moore's "Anacreon," and two volumes by William Wordsworth,--poems with
which the American producer was unable to compete. In 1820 Samuel G.
Goodrich of Hartford published a complete edition of Trumbull's works in
two volumes, the type large and the paper excellent,--with a portrait of
the author, and good engravings of McFingal in the Cellar, and of Abijah
Mann bearing the Town Resolves of Marshfield to Boston. The sale did not
repay the outlay. When Trumbull died, in 1831, he was as completely
forgotten as any Revolutionary colonel or captain.
Humphreys once feeling, that, in spite of all his struggles, he was not
doing much, exclaimed,--
"Why, niggard language, dost thou balk my soul?"
He did not see the reason why: his soul had not much to say. This was
the trouble with them all. There was not a spark of genuine poetic fire
in the Seven. They sang without an ear for music; they strewed their
pages with faded artificial flowers which they mistook for Nature, and
endeavored to overcome sterility of imagination and want of passion by
veneering with magniloquent epithets. They padded their ill-favored
Muse, belaced and beruffled her, and covered her with garments
stiffened with tawdry embroidery to hide her leanness; they overpowdered
and overrouged to give her the beauty Providence had refused. I say
their Muse, but they had no Muse of their own; they imported an inferior
one from England, and tried her in every style,--Pope's and Dryden's,
Goldsmith's and Gray's, and never rose above a poor imitation; producing
something which looked like a model, but lacked its flavor: wooden
poetry, in short,--a genuine product of the soil.
Judging from their allusions to themselves, no one of the Seven
mistrusted his own poetical powers or the gifts of his colleagues. They
seem to have died in their error, unrepentant, in the comfortable hope
of an hereafter of fame. Their works have faded out of sight like an
unfinished photograph. It was a sad waste of human endeavor, a
profitless employment of labor, unusual in Connecticut.[C]
But, although thus "wrecked upon the rock of rhyme," these bards of
Connecticut were not mere waste-paper of mankind, as Franklin sneeringly
called our poets, but sensible, well-educated gentlemen of good English
stock, of the best social position, and industrious in their business;
for Alsop was the only one who "left no calling for the idle trade."
Hopkins stood at the head of his profession. Dwight was beloved and
respected as minister, legislator, theologian, and President of Yale
College. Trumbull was a member of the State Legislature, State's
Attorney, and Judge of the Supreme Court. Humphreys served on
Washington's staff, received a sword from Congress for his gallantry at
Yorktown, was Secretary of Legation at Paris, Minister to Portugal and
Spain, and introduced merino sheep into New England. Barlow, as we have
already seen, was Ambassador to France at the time of his death. All of
these, except Trumbull, had borne arms, and did not throw away their
shields like Archilochus and Horace. They were sincere patriots, who
honestly predicted a future of boundless progress in wealth, science,
religion, and virtue for the United States,--the exemplar of liberty and
justice to the world, "surpassing all nations that have ever existed, in
magnitude, felicity, and duration." And on the other hand, every one of
them believed in the decline and impending fall of their old enemy,
Great Britain. Barlow's "Hesper" even hints that a Columbus from New
England may one day rediscover the Old World.
After the peace, when the closer union of the States under one general
government was proposed, the Hartford Wits worked hard to argue down and
to laugh down the bitter and absurd opposition which sprang up. That
great question was settled definitively by the adoption of the new
Constitution, and another took its place: How is this document to be
interpreted? The Hartford men, excepting, of course, Joel Barlow, the
Lost Pleiad of the group, whose head had been turned by the bewildering
theories of his French fellow-citizens, were warmly in favor of
administering the new government on Federal principles. Were not the
Federalists right? More than thirty years ago, De Tocqueville pronounced
in their favor; De Witt, in his recent essay on Jefferson, comes to the
same decision: both observers who have no party-feelings nor
class-prejudices to mislead them. And have not the last few years given
us all light enough to see that abstractly, as statesmen, the Federal
leaders were right? As politicians, in the degraded American sense of
the word, they were unskilful; they accelerated the downfall of their
party by injudicious measures and by petty rivalries. But although their
ruin might have been adjourned, it could not have been avoided; we now
know that their fate was inevitable. The democracy must have run over
them and trodden them out by the sheer brute force of numbers; no
superiority in wisdom or in virtue could have saved them long.
In those hot and angry days a _mania politica_ raged among the
inhabitants of the United States. One could no longer recognize the
sensible people who had fought the British stoutly for seven years,
without the slightest idea that they were struggling for anything more
than independence of foreign rule. Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow,
graduates of the great French Revolution University, had come to teach
them the new jargon: the virtue and wisdom of the people; the natural
rights of man; the natural propensity of rulers and priests to ignore
them; and other similar high-sounding words, the shibboleth and the
mainstay of the Democratic party to this day. The Anti-Federalists were
as much pleased to learn that they had been contending for these
beautiful phrases as was Monsieur Jourdain when told he had been
speaking _de la prose_ all his life. They assumed the title of Citizen,
invented that of Citess to please strong-minded sisters, and became as
crazy as Monsieur Jourdain when invested with the dignity of Mamamouchi.
They proclaimed that the government of the United States, like all other
governments, was naturally hostile to the rights of the people; France
was their only hope; if the leagued despotisms succeeded against her,
they would soon send their engines of destruction among them. They
planted trees of liberty, and danced about them, and sang the Carmagnole
with variations from Yankee Doodle; they offered their lives for
liberty, which was in no danger, not even from their follies; and swore
destruction to tyrants, as if that unpopular class of persons existed in
the United States. They were the people,--the wise, the pure,--who could
do no wrong. The Federalists were aristocrats, monocrats,--lovers of
court ceremonies and levees, chariots and servants and plate. The
distinguished chief of the French party, whose "heart was a perpetual
bleeding fountain of philanthropy," was not above pretending to believe
that his opponents were striving to "establish the hell of monarchy" in
this republican paradise, and were "ready to surrender the commerce of
the country, and almost every privilege as a free, sovereign, and
independent nation, to the British." Even such a man as Samuel Adams, at
a dinner on board of a French frigate, could put the _bonnet rouge_ on
his venerable head, and pray that "France alone might rule the seas."
The New-Englanders laughed at the charge of monarchical predilections,
so absurdly inconsistent with their history, their laws, habits, and
feelings. Before the war, leading men in other Colonies had affected to
dread their levelling propensities; and General Charles Lee had said of
them, with some truth, that they were the only Americans who had a
single republican qualification or idea. Freedom was an old fireside
acquaintance; they knew that the dishevelled, hysterical creature the
Gallo-Democrats worshipped was a delusion, and feared she might prove a
snare. Their common sense taught them to pay little attention to _a
priori_ disquisitions on natural rights, social compacts,
etc.,--metaphysics of politics, nugatory for all practical American
purposes,--and to reject as ridiculous the promised millennium of
supreme reason and perfected man. From a long experience in the
management of public affairs, they learned that our new government was
in danger from its weakness rather than from its strength; hence they
rejected the fatal doctrine of State rights, the root of the greatest
political evil, Secession. In the theories and in the measures of the
Democrats, in the very absurdity of the accusations made against
themselves, they thought they perceived a reckless purpose to relax
authority for the sake of popularity, which would lead to mob-rule, more
distasteful to the orderly Yankee than any other form of tyranny.
Moreover, in the Eastern States most of the Anti-Federalists belonged
to the lowest class of society; and, not content with urging their
pernicious public policy, the more turbulent of the party showed a
strong inclination to adopt French principles in religion and morals, as
well as in government. Robespierre had announced pompously, "_L'Atheisme
est aristocratique._" New England Federalists thought it democratic on
this side of the ocean. If they must choose between the Tri-Color and
the Cross of St. George, they preferred the Cross. There was no
guillotine in Great Britain,--no capering about plaster statues of the
Goddess of Reason; people read their Bibles, went to church, and
respected the holy sacrament of matrimony. But they wished for neither a
France nor an England; they desired to make an America after their own
hearts,--religious, just, orderly, and industrious; they believed that
on the Federalist plan such a nation could be built up, and on no
other; they opposed Jeffersonian politics then as they oppose
Jeffersonian-Davis politics now, and they were as heartily abused then
as they have been since, and as foolishly.
It must be confessed that the Hartford Wits did ample injustice to their
antagonists. Mr. Jefferson was certainly not an Avatar of the enemy of
mankind, nor were his followers atheists, anarchists, and rogues. But in
1799 there were no shabbier Democrats than those of Connecticut. If we
may judge of the old race by a few surviving specimens, we may pardon
our poets, if they added contempt to theoretical disapprobation, and, in
their eagerness to
"Confound their politics"
and
"Expose their knavish tricks,"
allowed their feelings to exaggerate the unpleasant traits of the master
and of his disciples.
The Hartford men were on the losing side. Federalism expired with the
election of Monroe. Its degenerate successor, Whiggism, had no
principles of value, and only lagged in the rear of the Democratic
advance. Statesmanship and good sense went hopelessly down before the
discipline of party and the hunger for office; and with each year it
became easier to catch a well-meaning, but short-sighted public in any
trap baited with the usual _ad captandum_ commonplaces. We are very
frequently told that "History is philosophy teaching by example,"--one
of those copy-book apophthegms which people love to repeat as if they
contained important truth. But the teachings of history or of philosophy
never reach the ears of the multitude; they are drowned by the din of
selfish rogues or of blind enthusiasts. Poor stupid humanity goes round
and round like a mill-horse in a dreary ring of political follies. The
cast-off sophisms and rhetorical rubbish of a past generation are
patched up, scoured, and offered to the credulous present as something
novel and excellent. People do not know how often the rotten stuff has
been used and thrown away, and accept it readily. After a while, they
discover to their cost, as their ancestors did before them, that it is
good for nothing. But even if it were possible to have a grand
international patent-office for political devices, where the venerable
machines, so often reinvented to break down again, could be labelled
worthless, and exhibited to all the world, I fear that the newest pet
demagogue would persuade the voters of his district, in spite of their
eyes, that he had contrived an improvement to make some one of the
rickety old things work. No wonder that Dr. Franklin lost patience, when
he saw how sadly reason was perverted by ignorance, selfishness, and
wickedness, and wished "that mankind had never been endowed with a
reasoning faculty, since they know so little how to make use of it, and
so often mislead themselves by it, and that they had been furnished with
a good sensible instinct instead of it."
Connecticut should be proud of her poets: not as literary luminaries of
the first magnitude, but as manly citizens, who sincerely loved justice,
order, self-control;--in two words, genuine freedom; as cultivated
gentlemen, who belonged to a class no longer numerous.
"This small, this blest secluded State
Still meets unmoved the blasts of Fate."
Unmoved, indeed, as in Federal times, but suffering sadly from
depletion. The great West and the city of New York have sucked her best
blood. There still remain inventive machinists, acute money-changers,
acutest peddlers; but the seed of the Muses has run out. No more
Pleiades at Hartford; no three "mighties," like Hosmer, Ellsworth, and
Johnson; no lawyers of infinite wit, like Tracy and Daggett; no Wolcotts
or Shermans: but the small State can boast that she has still within her
borders many sons full of the spirit shown by Comfort Sage and by Return
Jonathan Meigs, when they marched for Boston at the head of their
companies as soon as the news of Lexington reached Connecticut.