Climb in the east and circle with the sun;
And smiling Glory stretch triumphant wings
O’er hosts of heroes and o’er tribes of kings.”
A world of eighteenth-century thought, peopled with personifications, lay buried in the ten thousand lines of President Dwight’s youthful poem. Perhaps in the year 1800, after Jefferson’s triumph, Dwight would have been less eager that his hero should save the Rights of Man; by that time the phrase had acquired a flavor of French infidelity which made it unpalatable to good taste. Yet the same Jeffersonian spirit ran through Dwight’s famous national song, which was also written in the Revolutionary War:—
“Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise,
The queen of the world and child of the skies!
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Thy heroes the rights of mankind shall defend,
And triumph pursue them, and glory attend.
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