The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays. Beers Henry Augustin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and reflective portions: the burning of Fairfield in 1779 by the British under Governor Tryon; the destruction of the remnants of the Pequod Indians in a swamp three miles west of the town. It is distressing to have the Yankee farmer called “the swain,” and his wife and daughter “the fair,” in regular eighteenth century style; and Long Island, which is always in sight and frequently apostrophized, personified as “Longa.”

      Then on the borders of this sapphire plain

      Shall growing beauties grace my fair domain

* * * * *

      Gay groves exult: Chinesian gardens glow,

      And bright reflections paint the wave below.

      The poet celebrates Connecticut artists and inventors: —

      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 СКАЧАТЬ