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:—