The line italicized we have seen quoted by some of our daily critics as beautiful; and so, barring the “oak-shadowed air,” it is. In the meantime Campbell, in “Gertrude of Wyoming,” has the words
—the hunter and the deer a shade.
Campbell stole the idea from our own Freneau, who has the line
The hunter and the deer a shade.
Between the two, Mr. Mathews’ claim to originality, at this point, will, very possibly, fall to the ground.
It appears to us that the author of “Wakondah” is either very innocent or very original about matters of versification. His stanza is an ordinary one. If we are not mistaken, it is that employed by Campbell in his “Gertrude of Wyoming”—a favorite poem of our author’s. At all events it is composed of pentameters whose rhymes alternate by a simple and fixed rule. But our poet’s deviations from this rule are so many and so unusually picturesque, that we scarcely know what to think of them. Sometimes he introduces an Alexandrine at the close of a stanza; and here we have no right to quarrel with him. It is not usual in this metre; but still he may do it if he pleases. To put an Alexandrine in the middle, or at the beginning, of one of these stanzas is droll, to say no more. See stanza third, which commences with the verse
Upon his brow a garland of the woods he wears,
and stanza twenty-eight, where the last line but one is
And rivers singing all aloud tho’ still unseen.
Stanza the seventh begins thus