“The Hunter and the Deer, a shade,”
was adopted by Campbell.
“She walks the water like a thing of life,”
was gathered under the wing of Byron.
And Sir Walter Scott, in the introduction to the Third Canto of Marmion, made use of a striking image of our poet. Scott’s lines are:
“When Prussia hurried to the field
And snatched the spear—but left the shield.”
But in Freneau’s poem on the battle of Eutaw, he says:
“They saw their injured country’s woe,
The flaming towns, the wasted fields,—
They rushed to meet th’ insulting foe,
They took the spear—but left the shield.”
It is pleasing to recall these few lines of an ancient Knickerbocker poet. They are perhaps the only lines that were ever stolen in those days by eminent British authors, from this side of the Atlantic.
But the ode “To Ennui,” published in the N. Y. Evening Post, March 10th, 1819, and written by another Knickerbocker poet. Dr. Joseph Rodman Drake, and signed Croaker,” was the spark that first fired the poetic train in America. This was followed the next day by another playful strain from the same pen, entitled “On presenting the Freedom of the City in a Gold Box to a great General,” the great General being Andrew Jackson, afterwards President of the United States, as some of the oldest members of the Historical Society may remember. On the very next day appeared the “Secret Mine,”
