French speculations looked captivating, and Genet's movements won admiration, even with grave men. In common with others, our schoolmasters partook of the prevailing mania: the tricolored cockade was worn by numerous school-boys, as well as by their seniors. The yellow fever was wasting the population; but the patriotic fervor, either for French or English politics, glowed with ardor. With other boys I united in the enthusiasm. The Carminole was heard every-where. I give a verse of a popular song echoed throughout the streets of our city, and heard at the Belvidere at that period:
Once was bound, but now is free;
She broke her chain, for to maintain
The rights and cause of liberty."
Strains like this of the Columbian bards in those days of party virulence emancipated the feelings of many a throbbing breast, even as now the songs, of pregnant simplicity and affluent tenderness, by Morris, afford delight to a community pervaded by a calmer spirit, and controlled by a loftier refinement. Moreover, we are to remember that in that early age of the Republic an author, and above all a poet, was not an every-day article. True, old Dr. Smith, once a chemical professor in King's College, surcharged with learning and love, who found Delias and Daphnes everywhere, might be seen in the public ways, with his madrigals for the beautiful women of his select acquaintance; but the buds of promise of the younger Low (of a poetic family) were blighted by an ornithological error:
The nightingale warbles her song in the grove."
Weems had not yet appeared in the market, with his Court of Hymen; Clifton was pulmonary; Wardell's declaration
was annunciatory—and nothing more; and Searson, exotic by birth, yet domesticated with us, having made vast struggles in his perilous
