All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow,
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.”
And again:
“Then shook the hills with thunder riven,
Then rushed the steed to battle driven,
And louder than the bolts of heaven,
Far flashed the red artillery.”
If Thomas Campbell[18] had never written anything more than that page-long story of the “Battle of Hohenlinden,” his name would have gone into all the anthologies, and his verse into all those school-books where boys for seventy years now have pounded at his martial metre in furies of declamation. And yet this bit of martial verse, so full of the breath of battle, was, at the date of its writing, rejected by the editor of a small provincial journal in Scotland—as not coming up to the true poetic standard![19]
I have spoken of Campbell as a Scotsman; though after only a short stay in Scotland—following his university career at Glasgow—and a starveling tour upon the Continent (out of which flashed “Hohenlinden”)—he went to London; and there or thereabout spent the greater part of the residue of a long life. He had affiliations of a certain sort with America, out of which may possibly have grown his Gertrude of Wyoming; his father was for much time a merchant in Falmouth, Virginia, about 1770; being however a strong loyalist, he returned in 1776. A brother and an uncle of the poet became established in this country, and an American Campbell of this stock was connected by marriage with the family of Patrick Henry.