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appellations that convey no other impressions to the mind than horror and aversion.

There is no duty more congenial to the feelings, or more worthy the genius of a poet, than to describe the manners, and celebrate the virtues of the early inhabitants of our native country. We love to trace in the untutored wildness of the aboriginal Britons, the leading features of that manly and independent character which is at once the pride and security of their civilized descendants.

The prowess of Boadicea, and the fortitude of Caractacus, will always excite emotions of pathetic enthusiasm in a people, of which bravery and intrepidity are the characteristic virtues. Even in the earliest period of European civilization, and the darkest ages of monastic ignorance, Britain has been the native soil of patriots and heroes. We may still look back with pride and pleasure to the days of Alfred, and of Edward, and may still recall to our remembrance with feelings of patriotic exultation, the plain of Runnymede, and the field of Agincourt. The feudal subjection of our ancestors was favourable to the display of the nobler feelings and the severer virtues. The austere intrepidity, the untutored eloquence, and the unpolished hospitality of the chief, contrasted by the patient attachment, the proud fidelity, and the submissive courage of his retainers, are well adapted for the purposes of poetical delineation, and still supply the materials of a picture which the inheritors of their virtues, and the improvers of their political institutions may contemplate with gratitude and

wonder.

But to what period in the history of his country, can the American look back with other feelings than humiliation, and disgust? Those favoured spots which are now the seats of legislation, and the emporia of commerce, were once the refuge of uncivilized Barbarians; cruel in prosperity, and servile in misfortune; unsusceptible of intellectual improvement, and dograded by every propensity that can render the human character an object of abhorrence and contempt; allied by colour and disposition to the domestic slaves of their European conquerors; and the object of popular alarm, and legislative jealousy. It is obvious, that every feeling of personal pride, or patriotic attachment, will lead the successors of such a race to draw an impenetrable veil over the early history of their country, and to turn aside from the scenery that has witnessed their warlike exploits, and their religious ceremonies, with feelings of indifference to its natural beauties, and of aversion for the people by whose crimes and abominations it has been polluted.

Deriving their origin from a country which political events have taught them to regard with feelings of habitual hostility; the Americans have no ancestorial achievements to record, no founder whom their patriotism will permit them to commemorate. To retrace the wanderings, and to celebrate the virtues of a Raleigh, or a Penn, would be to emblazon the biographical annals of a nation to which they are indebted nof only for their political existence, but for all the refinements of civilized society. Their knowledge of science, and of letters. and even that spirit of liberty which first taught them the value of independence, are borrowed from a people whose proficiency in the arts of government, and the literæ humaniores, they no longer regard but with envious rivalry. The most transient allusion to the past is calculated to repress that fervour of patriotism uninspired, by which the productions of every writer, however gifted by nature, or improved by study, must be vapid and inanimate. An American poet can take no pleasure in the recollection of a period when his native soil was dependent for its existence on the mother country; and, if he confine the excursions of his fancy within the limits of the narrow circle of events that has rolled its course since the declaration of American independence; what is there to be found that can ennoble his efforts, or animate his enthusiasm? His native scenery we have already shewn to be unadapted to

the purposes of poetry, and the artificial institutions which form the bulwarks of American society, have neither the beauty of youth, the stability of manhood, nor the dignity of age. Nothing that surrounds him, or that can present itself to his imagination, displays a single feature of the awful, or the venerable. There are no national reliques of antiquity over which the pensive may lament the uncertainty of life, and the instability of sublunary grandeur; no productions of the chisel or the pencil, which may recall to the lovers of virtue, and the admirers of genius, the remembrance of departed greatness; no princely institutions for the furtherance of piety and learning, or the relief of disease and indigence: there are no hospitals to commemorate the liberality of her merchants; no cathedrals to attest the piety of her clergy; nor any university to celebrate the munificence of her princes, and her statesmen. The numerous sources of poetical association that arise from the contemplation of the inanimate memorials of genius, piety, and valour, will for many ages be unopened to our American descendants.

Such, therefore, are the local disadvantages to which a transatlantic poet is subjected, that he neither possesses any natural subject of great beauty or elevation; nor, if he were able to select from the history of mankind a theme not unworthy of his genius, would he be able to elevate and adorn it by that association of sentiment and imagery, which alone distinguishes the poet from the rhymester. But it should not be forgotten, that from all the foreign sources to which a European poet can refer for a subject of epic celebration, when the events of his own country are apparently exhausted, he is equally excluded. With what pleasure or propriety could Mr. Barlow record the exploits of princes, or celebrate the virtues of an hereditary episcopacy? The pomp of courts, and the " pride and circumstance" of war, must be contemplated by an American poet through the spectacles of books, and he, therefore, views them with apathy, and sees them indistinctly. There still

remains so much of regal splendour, and knightly courtesy among the different nations of Europe; that the magnificence of the feudal and chivalrous ages, are neither uncongenial to the feelings, nor beyond the powers of an attentive observer of modern manners. But the pride of aristocratic superiority, and the ostentation of romantic valour, are equally inimical to the prepossessions, and uncongenial to the imagination of a republican merchant and agriculturist; and should it happen by some strange caprice of fortune, that an American endowed with the qualifications of a poet, should be a secret admirer of monarchical government, it is easy to discover that cold correctness of description, and the loftiness of laboured declama`tion, must be received as a substitute for the flow of lyric impetuosity, and the fire of poetical inspiration. The citizens of Greece and Rome still retained the romantic character of predatory warriors, and possessed the grandeur of royalty without its name; but the republic of America displays the same avarice of possession, without the same spirit of generous bravery; and, with the name of royalty, has relinquished the most useful, and the least offensive of its attributes.

That "great and glorious struggle" which terminated in the independence of America, appears to us totally unsusceptible of all the blandishments of poetry. There was nothing generous in the motives of the people, or romantic in the character of their chief. We are afraid that however well the moral virtues, and the constitutional intrepidity of Washington might be adapted to a regular eulogy; he would bear but a poor comparison as the hero of an epic poem, with the bullies and barbarians of ancient Greece. It may be as praise-worthy for a people to resist the payment of a stampduty, as to fight in defence of their wives, 'and their religion; but it is not equally poetical-a nation of warriors struggling against the overbearing power of cruelty and lust, will always be a more interesting spectacle than a commercial populace; whose first emotions of patriotic enthusiasm terminate in the seizure of a cargo of tea, and the demolition of a customhouse. It was not the hope of saving five per cent. on the value of their morning beverage, that fired the breasts of the heroes of Thermopylæ!

Nor will the American votaries of the muse be able to atone for their inevitable deficiencies in the higher qualities of poetry, by their superiority in the humbler requisites of style and versification. It would be trifling with the patience of our readers, to prove that the further a colony recedes from its mother country in policy and manners, the more will the purity of its original diction be violated, and the delicacies of its idiom be forgotten. Whatever be his ambition, or assiduity, a writer will not long be able to preserve his language and phraseology uncontaminated by the barbarisms and irregularities of colloquial inter

course.

His style will display all the stiffness and embarrassment that characterize the composition of a modern latinist, without his purity of diction, or correctness of construction; the lighter shades of synonomic difference will glide into indistinctness, and all flexibility of expression be therefore unattainable. To the justice of these remarks, every verse of the Columbiad affords an unsuspicious testimony, and a conviction of their truth inclines us to regret that exertions so unremitted, and talents so respectable, as Mr. Barlow's should have been so unprofitably wasted.

To causes such as these, rather than to the influence of climate, may be ascribed the apparent sterility of American genius. It is not the existence of poetical power in the inhabitants of the New Continent, that we are disposed to deny, but the possibility of its developement: and there is too much reason to conclude, that the same obstacles will produce the same effects, for a period that would exhaust even the patience of Mr. Jefferson. Though the positions of Montesquieu be absurd, and the censures of the Abbé Raynal unjust, the hopes of the American president are equally fallacious.

As we are not of opinion that the progress of genius is bounded by the accidental peculiarities of geographic situation; that one country shall excel in the arts of life, and

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