These two lines, descriptive, unfortunately, of too many ministrations, are all that have survived of the three cantos. Trumbull's chef d'œuvre is "McFingal," begun before the war and finished soon after the peace. The poem covers the whole Revolutionary period, from the Boston tea-party to the final humiliation of Great Britain: Lord North and General Gage, Hutchinson, Judge Oliver, and Treasurer Gray; Doctors Sam. Peters and Seabury; passive obedience and divine right; no taxation without representation; Rivington the printer, Massachusettensis, and Samuel Adams; Yankee Doodle; who began the war? town-meetings, liberty-poles, mobs, tarring, feathering, and smoking Tories; Tryon, Galloway, Burgoyne, Prescott, Guy Carleton; paper-money, regulation, and tender; in short, all the men and topics which preserve our polyphilosophohistorical societies from lethargic extinction. "McFingal" hit the taste of the times; it was very successful. But although thirty editions were sold in shops or hawked about by peddlers, there was no copyright law in the land, and Trumbull took more praise than solid pudding by his poetry. It was reprinted in England, and found its way to France. The Marquis de Chastellux, an author himself, took an especial interest in American literature. He wrote to congratulate Trumbull upon his excellent poem, and took the opportunity to lay down "the conditions prescribed for burlesque poetry." "These, Sir, you have happily seized and perfectly complied with.... I believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry could offer.... Nor do I hesitate to assure you that I prefer it to every work of the kind,—even to Hudibras." Notwithstanding the opinion of the pompous Marquis, nobody reads "McFingal." Time has blotted out most of the four cantos. There are left a few lines, often quoted by gentlemen of the press, and invariably ascribed to "Hudibras":—
"For any man with half an eye
What stands before him can espy;
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen."
"But as some muskets so contrive it
As oft to miss the mark they drive at,
And though well aimed at duck or plover,
Bear wide and kick their owners over."
"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."
The last two verses have passed into immortality as a proverb. Perhaps a few other grains of corn might be picked out of these hundred and seventy pages of chaff.
Dr. Dwight staked his fame on "The Conquest of Canaan," an attempt to make an Iliad out of the Old Testament. Eleven books; nine thousand six hundred and seventy-two dreary verses, full of battles and thunderstorms; peopled with Irad, Jabin, Hanniel, Hezron, Zimri, and others like them, more colorless and shadowy than the brave Gyas and the brave Cloanthus. Not a line of this epic has survived. Shorter and much better is "Greenfield Hill," a didactic poem, composed, the author said, to amuse and to instruct in economical, political, and moral sentiments. Greenfield was, for a time, the scene of the Doctor's professional labors. His descriptions of New England character, of the prosperity and comfort of New England life, are accurate, but not vivid. The book is full of good sense, but there is little poetry in it. True to the literary instincts of the Pleiads, he shines with reflected light, and works after Thomson and Goldsmith so closely that in many passages imitation passes into parody.
Like Timotheus of Greece, Timothy of Connecticut
"to his breathing flute and sounding lyre
Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire."
He wrote a war chant; he wrote psalms; and there is a song in the "Litchfield Collection" in which he attempts to kindle soft desire. Here is an extract:—
No longer, then, fair maid, delay
The promised scenes of bliss,
Nor idly give another day
The joys assigned to this.
"Quit, then, oh, quit, thou lovely maid!
Thy bashful virgin pride,"—