Spilling your blood beneath life’s bitter thrall,
A little while and we shall all meet there,
And one kind Mother’s bosom screen us all;
Oppression’s harness will no longer tire
Or gall us there, nor Sorrow’s whip of fire.
But we are borrowing too much from our embryo volume. Patience, dear Public! until we can find a publisher. In the mean time, examine the specimens we have presented to you. Can any one tell us where to look for sonnets, more satisfactory than these? We congratulate our country on the prospect of our soon having an American literature. Let our industrious young aspirants try a work in which they may succeed in producing something of sterling value. A year or two will suffice to turn half the plodding prose writers of Britain into original poets. Every brilliant article that appears in the Quarterly might here renascent spring forth like Arethusa, in a new and more melodious voice; bubbling up in a pretty epic or stormy lyric. See, for example, how easily Sidney Smith might be done into rhyme:
SONNET V.
I never meet at any public dinner
A Pennsylvanian, but my fingers itch
To pluck his borrowed plumage from the sinner,