The Yankee was not more boastful than other types of Americans, though his talent for exaggerative description was marked. Yet he had a pronounced national obsession and was uncompromising in his patriotism: “This land o’ourn, I tell ye’s got to be a better country than man ever see,” was put into a Yankee’s mouth by one of their own spokesmen and represents the Yankee type of mild jingoism. It is full cousin to that other sentiment which also this writer assigns to him:
Resolved, that other nations all, if set longside of us,
For vartoo, larnin, chiverlry, aint noways wuth a cuss.[37]
These are but cruder expressions of ideas dating from the Revolutionary War, and of which Timothy Dwight, who was not a poet by predestination, gave us in verse a noble example:
Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise,
The queen of the world, and child of the skies!
Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold,
While ages on ages thy splendors unfold.
Thy reign is the last, and the noblest of time,
Most fruitful thy soil, most inviting thy clime;