In that remote period of history which is especially visited upon us in our school-days, in expiation of the sins of our forefathers, there nourished seven poets at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Royal favor and amiable dispositions united them in a club: public applause and self-appreciation led them to call it The Pleiades. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Pierre Ronsard, emulous of Greek fame, took to him six other poets more wretched than himself, and made up a second Pleiades for France. The third rising of this rhythmical constellation was seen in Connecticut a long time ago.
Connecticut is pleasant, with wooded hills and a beautiful river; plenteous with tobacco and cheese; fruitful of merchants, missionaries, sailors, peddlers, and singlewomen;—but there are no poets known to exist there, unless it be that well-paid band who write the rhymed puffs of cheap garments and cosmetics. The brisk little democratic State has turned its brains upon its machinery. Not a snug valley, with a few drops of water at the bottom of it, but rattles with the manufacture of notions, great and small,—axes and pistols, carriages and clocks, tin pans and toys, hats, garters, combs, buttons, and pins. You see that the enterprising natives can turn out any article on which a profit may be made,—except poetry. That product, you would say, was out of the question. Nevertheless, the species poet, although extinct, did once exist on that soil. The evidence is conclusive that palaeozoic verse-makers wandered over those hills in bygone ages. Their moss-grown remains, still visible here and there, are as unmistakable as the footprints of the huge wading birds in the red sandstone of Middletown and Chatham. Où la poésie va-t'elle se nicher? How came the Muses to settle in Connecticut?
Dr. Samuel Peters, in his trustworthy history of the Colony, gives no answer to this question; but among the oldest inhabitants of remote Barkhamstead, for whom it is said General Washington and the worthies of his date still have a being in the flesh, there lingers a mythological tradition which may explain this aberration of Connecticut character. The legend runs thus.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, English readers were entertained with elaborate allegories, in which the passions, the vices, and even the habits of mankind were personified. Lighter ethical topics were served up in letters from Philotryphus, Septimius, or others ending in us, and in communications from Flirtilla, Jack Modish, and Co. Eastern tales and apologues, meditations on human life, essays on morality, inquiries as to whether the arts and sciences were serviceable or prejudicial to the human race, dissertations on the wisdom and virtue of the Chinese, were all the fashion in literature. The Genius of authorship, or the Demon, if you prefer it, was so precise, refined, exquisite in manner, and so transcendentally moral in ethics, that he had become almost insufferable to his master, Apollo. The God was a little tired, if the truth were known, with the monotonous chant of Pope, in spite of his wit. He began to think that something more was required, to satisfy the soul than polished periods and abstract didactic morality,—and was not much surprised when he observed that Prior, after dining with Addison and Co., liked to finish the evening with a common soldier and his wife, and refresh his mind over a pipe and a pot of beer. But Pope was dead, and so was Thomson, and Goldsmith not yet heard from. There was a famine of literary invention in England. Out of work and wages for himself and his troupe, "disgusted at the age and clime, barren of every glorious theme," Phoebus Apollo determined to emigrate. Berkeley had reported favorably of the new Western Continent: it was a land of poetical promise to the Bishop.
"There shall be sung another golden age,
The rise of empire and of arts;
The good and great inspiring epic rage,
The wisest heads and noblest hearts."
Trusting in the judgment of a man who had every virtue under heaven, the God of Song shipped with the tuneful Nine for America. Owing, perhaps, to insufficiency of transportation, the Graces were left behind. The vessel sailed past Rhode Island in a fog, and disembarked its precious freight at New Haven, in the Colony of Connecticut. In the pleasant summer weather, the distinguished foreigners travelled northward as far as Litchfield Hill, and thence to Hartford, on the banks of the beautiful river. They found the land well wooded and well watered; the natives good-natured, industrious, and intelligent: but the scenery was monotonous to the Pierian colonists, and the people distasteful. The clipped hair and penitential scowl of the men made heavy the hearts of the Muses; their daughters and wives had a sharp, harsh, pert "tang" in their speech, that grated upon the ears of Apollo, who held with King Lear as to the excellence of a low, soft voice in woman. Each native seemed to the strangers sadly alike in looks, dress, manners, and pursuits, to every other native. Of Art they were absolutely ignorant. They built their temples on the same model as their barns. Poetry meant Psalms sung through their noses to the accompaniment of a bass-viol. Of other musical instruments, they knew only the Jews-harp for home delectation, and the drum and fife for training-days. Doctrinal religion furnished them with a mental relaxation which supplied the place of amusement. Sandemanians, Adamites, Peterites, Bowlists, Davisonians, and Rogereens, though agreeing mainly in essentials, found vast gratification in playing against each other at theological dialectics. On one cardinal point of discipline only—the necessity of administering creature comfort to the sinful body—did all sects zealously unite. They offered copious, though coarse, libations to Bacchus, in the spirit-stirring rum of their native land.[B]
After careful observation, the nine ladies conferred together, and decided that in this part of the world their sphere of usefulness was limited and their mission a failure. Polymnia, Urania, and Clio might get into good society, but Thalia and Terpsichore were sure to be set in the stocks; and what was poor Erato to expect, but a whipping, in a commonwealth that forbade its women to uncover their necks or to expose their arms above the wrists? They made up their minds not to "locate"; packed up barbiton and phorminx, mask and cothurn, took the first ship bound to Europe, and quietly sailed away. Their stay was short, but they left their mark. To this day Phoebes are numerous in Connecticut, and nine women to one man has become the customary proportion of the sexes. As Greece had Parnassus, Helicon, and Pindus, Connecticut had New Haven, Hartford, and Litchfield Hill,—halting-places of the illustrious travellers. There they scattered the seeds of poetry,—seeds which fell upon stony places, but, warmed by the genial influence of the Sun-God, sprang up and brought forth such fruit as we shall see.
John Trumbull was born in Watertown, a.d. 1750; two years later, in Northampton, came Timothy Dwight: both of the best New England breed: Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards; Trumbull, cousin to kind old Governor Trumbull, (whose pompous manner in transacting the most trifling public business amused Chastellux and the Hussar officers at Windham,) and consequently second cousin to the son of the Governor, Colonel John Trumbull, whose paintings might possibly have added to the amusement of the gay Frenchmen, had they stayed in America long enough to see them. Cowley, Milton, and Pope lisped in numbers; but the precocity of Trumbull was even more surprising. He passed his college examination at the age of eight, in the lap of a Dr. Emmons; but was remanded to the nursery to give his stature time to catch up with his acquirements. Dwight, too, was ready for college at eight, and was actually entered at thirteen.
About this time there were symptoms of an æsthetical thaw in Connecticut. There had been no such word as play in the dictionary of the New-Englanders. They worked hard on their stony soil, and read hard in their stony books of doctrine. That stimulant to the mind, outside of daily routine, which the human race must have under all circumstances, (we call it excitement nowadays,) was found by the better sort in theological quarrels, by the baser in New England rum,—the two things most cheering to the spirit of man, if Byron is to be believed. Education meant solid learning,—that is to say, studies bearing upon divinity, law, medicine, or merchandise; and to peruse works of the imagination was considered an idle waste of time,—indeed, as partaking somewhat of the nature of sin. But the growing taste of Connecticut was no longer satisfied with Dr. Watts's moral lyrics, whose jingle is still so instructive and pleasant to extreme youth. Milton and Dryden, Thomson and Pope, were read and admired; "The Spectator" was quoted as the standard of style and of good manners; and daring spirits even ventured upon Richardson's novels and "Tristram Shandy."
While in this literary revival all Yale was anxious, young Dwight and Trumbull were indulging in hope. Smitten with the love of verse, Dwight announced his rising genius (these are the words of the "Connecticut Magazine and New Haven Gazette") by versions of two odes of Horace, and by "America," a poem after the manner of Pope's "Windsor Forest." At the age of nineteen he invoked the venerable Muse who has been called in as the "Poet's Lucina," since Homer established her professional reputation, and dashed boldly at the epic,—"the greatest work human nature is capable of." His great work was "The Conquest of Canaan." Trumbull, more modest, wrote "The Progress of Dulness," in three cantos. To these young men of genius came later two other nurslings of the Muses,—David Humphreys from Derby, and Joel Barlow from Reading. They caught the poetical distemper. Barlow, fired by Dwight's example, began "The Vision of Columbus." The four friends, young and hopeful, encouraging and praising each other, gained some local reputation by fugitive pieces in imitation of English models, published "Spectator" essays in the New Haven papers, and forestalled all cavillers by damning the critics after the method used by Dryden and Pope against Settle and Cibber.