The morning after the piece appeared, a fellow printer-boy seems to have quoted the line aloud for all to hear, and dramatized it by patting the author on the head, inwardly raging but helpless to resent the liberty. In fact, the poet did not well know how to manage the publicity now thrust upon him. He behaved indeed with such outrageous resentment at finding his first piece of verse in print that his father, who had smuggled it into the editor’s hands, well-nigh renounced him and all his works. But not quite; he was too fond of both, and the boy and he were presently abetting each other in the endeavor for his poetic repute—so soon does the love of fame go to the strongest head.
As yet neither looked for his recognition in that sort of literature which the boy was ultimately to be best or most known in. He seems not to have read at this time much prose fiction, but he was reading Homer in Pope’s translation, or rather he was reading the Odyssey; the Iliad he found tiresome and noisy; and if the whole truth must be told, as I have understood it, he liked The Battle of the Frogs and Mice best of all the Homeric poems. It was this which he imitated in a burlesque epic of The Cat Fight, studied from nature in the hostilities nightly raging on the back fences; but the only surviving poem of what may be called his classical period, as the poets of it understood Queen Anne’s age, is a pastoral so exactly modeled upon the pastorals of the great Mr. Pope, that but for a faulty line here and there and the intrusion of a few live American birds among the stuffed songsters of those Augustan groves, I do not see how Mr. Pope could deny having written it. He might well have rejoiced in a follower who loved him so devotedly and so exactly reproduced his artificiality in heroic couplets studied from his own, with the same empty motive to the same unreal effect, as the surviving fragments of it will witness.
“When fair Aurora kissed the purple East
And dusky night the struggling day released,
Two swains whom Phœbus waked from sleep’s embrace
Led forth their flocks to crop the dewy grass.
While morning blushed upon the cheek of day
Young Corydon began the rural lay.
Corydon.
“Now ceases Philomel her nightly strain,
And trembling stars forsake the ethereal plain;
Pale Luna fades and down the distant West
Sadly and slowly lowers her rayless crest;
But yellow Phœbus pours his beams along
And linnets sport where Philomela sung.
Here robins chirp and joyful orioles sing
Where late the owlet flapped his noiseless wing;
Here the pale lily spreads its petals wide,
And snowy daisies deck the green hillside;
Here violets’ bloom with waterflowers wreath,
And forest blossoms scent the Zephyr’s breath.
Fit spot for song where Spring in every flower
Rich incense offers to the morning hour.
Then let us sing! The hour is meet for love,
The plain, the vale, the music-breathing grove;
Let gentle Daphnis judge the doubtful song,
And soft Æolus bear the notes along.
I stake my pipe with whose soft notes I while
The tedious hours, and my toil beguile;
Whose mellow voice gives joy serener charms,
And grief of half its bitterness disarms.”
Here should enter some unnamed competitor, but apparently does not.
“And I, my dog, who guards by yonder brook
Two careless truants from his master’s flock;
Who views his timid charge with jealous eyes
And every danger for their sake defies.
In cheerful day my helpmate and my pride,
At night my brave companion and my guide.
The morning flies: no more the song delay,
For morning most delights the Sylvan Muse,
Ere modest twilight yields to flaming day,
And fervid sunbeams drink the cooling dews
And wither half the freshness of the Spring.”
Another nameless person, possibly the “gentle Daphnis,” now speaks:
“Alternate, then, ye swains must answering sing.
By turns the planets circle round the sun
In even turns the changing seasons run;
Smooth-coming night enshrouds the passing day,
And morn returning smiles the night away.”
And doubtless now it is Corydon who resumes: