In 1820 Drake died at the age of twenty-five, leaving as his literary bequest the inspiration for Halleck’s memorial verses,
Green be the turf above thee
Friend of my better days!
as well as his share in the “Croaker Papers,” and “The Culprit Fay,” and certain shorter poems which give promise of things much greater than this overrated attempt. The “Fay,” according to a letter by Halleck, was a three-day production of 1816, written to demonstrate that the Hudson River scenery could be turned to literary account. Whether or no the anecdote is true, Drake wrote to this point in his “To a Friend,” and in “Niagara” and “Bronx.” Yet the fact is worth remark that nothing in “The Culprit Fay” is any more explicitly true of the Hudson region than of the Rhine country or the Norwegian fiords. The poem reads like a pure fantasy, hurriedly and carelessly written by an inexperienced hand. Nevertheless, when published it was extravagantly praised. Halleck said, “It is certainly the best thing of the kind in the English language, and is more strikingly original than I had supposed it was possible for a modern poem to be.”[12]
In Halleck’s exclamatory surprise at originality in any modern poem is to be found the vital difference between the two friends. Halleck seemed to believe that the final canons for art had been fixed, and could hardly conceive of originality in a nineteenth-century poet; but Drake tried new things and rebelled at the old. His best efforts, however qualified their success, were strainings at the leash of eighteenth-century convention.
Go! kneel a worshipper at nature’s shrine!
For you her fields are green, and fair her skies!
For you her rivers flow, her hills arise!
And will you scorn them all, to pour forth tame
And heartless lays of feigned or fancied sighs?