[Illustration: TIMOTHY DWIGHT]
This poem is written in the rocking horse couplets of Pope, and it is well-nigh unreadable to-day. It is doubtful if twenty-five people in our times have ever read it through. Even where the author essays fine writing, as in the lines:—
"On spicy shores, where beauteous morning reigns,
Or Evening lingers o'er her favorite plains,"
there is nothing to awaken a single definite image, nothing but glittering generalities. Dwight's best known poetry is found in his song, Columbia, composed while he was a chaplain in the Revolutionary War:—
"Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise,
The queen of the world, and the child of the skies."
JOEL BARLOW (1755-1812) was, like Dwight, a chaplain in the war, but he became later a financier and diplomat, as well as a poet. He determined in The Vision of Columbus (1787), afterwards expanded into the ponderous Columbiad, to surpass Homer and all preceding epics. Barlow's classical couplets thus present a general in the Revolution, ordering a cannonade:—
"When at his word the carbon cloud shall rise,
And well-aim'd thunders rock the shores and skies."
[Illustration: JOEL BARLOW]
Hawthorne ironically suggested that the Columbiad should be dramatized and set to the accompaniment of cannon and thunder and lightning. Barlow, like many others, certainly did not understand that bigness is not necessarily greatness. He is best known by some lines from his less ambitious Hasty Pudding:—
"E'en in thy native regions, how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee Mush!"