High o'er the wat'ry uproar, silent seen,
Sailing sedate, in majesty serene,
Now midst the pillared spray sublimely lost,
Swept the gray eagles, gazing calm and slow,
On all the horrors of the gulf below;
Intent, alone, to sate themselves with blood,
From the torn victims of the raging flood.
Wilson was not the man to mistake a bird; and many other early travelers have testified to the former presence of eagles in considerable numbers, haunting the gorge below the falls in quest of the remains of animals that had been carried down stream.
Moore, as we have seen, denounced the country for its lack of
That lingering radiance of immortal mind
which so inspires the poet in older lands. He was right in his fact, but absurd in his fault-finding. It has somewhere been said of him, that Niagara Falls was the only thing he found in America which overcame his self-importance; but we must remember his youth, the flatteries on which he had fed at home and the crudities of American life at that time. For a quarter of a century after Tom Moore's visit there was much in the crass assertiveness of American democracy which was as ridiculous in its way as the Old-World ideas of class and social distinctions were in their way—and vastly more vulgar and offensive. Read, in evidence, Mrs. Trollope and Capt. Basil Hall, two of America's severest and sincerest critics. It should be put down to Tom Moore's credit, too, that before he died he admitted to Washington Irving and to others that his writings on America were the greatest sin of his early life.[80]
Like Moore, Alexander Wilson felt America's lack of a poet; and, like Barlow and Humphreys and Freneau and others of forgotten fame, he undertook—like them again, unsuccessfully—to supply the lack. There is something pathetic—or grotesque, as we look at it—in the patriotic efforts of these commonplace men to be great for their country's sake.
To Europe's shores renowned in deathless song,
asks Wilson,
Must all the honors of the bard belong?
And rural Poetry's enchanting strain
Be only heard beyond th' Atlantic main?
Yet Nature's charms that bloom so lovely here,
Unhailed arrive, unheeded disappear;
While bare black heaths and brooks of half a mile
Can rouse the thousand bards of Britain's Isle.
There, scarce a stream creeps down its narrow bed,
There scarce a hillock lifts its little head,
Or humble hamlet peeps their glades among
But lives and murmurs in immortal song.
Our Western world, with all its matchless floods,
Our vast transparent lakes and boundless woods,
Stamped with the traits of majesty sublime,
Unhonored weep the silent lapse of time,
Spread their wild grandeur to the unconscious sky,
In sweetest seasons pass unheeded by;
While scarce one Muse returns the songs they gave,
Or seeks to snatch their glories from the grave.