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The right to criticize is as valid as the power to invent; and the Editor, with that independence which becomes him, and without which this Journal would be of little worth, will always publish well-written strictures upon literary productions, even if he provoke the malignity of Prejudice, the misrepresentations of Absurdity, or the resentment of authors. EDITOR.

(From the London Monthly Magazine.)

Some account of the COLUMBIAD, a Poem in ten Books; by JOBL BARLOW: lately published at Philadelphia.

EVERY nation that can boast of an epic poem of sufficient merit to become a classical work, has certainly a good cause for self-complacency. Such a work inspires an additional interest, when built on a national subject; when the author, who is destined to gratify his countrymen by soaring to this highest flight of human genius, can find among their own annals an action capable of supporting a strength of pinion equal to the task.

The subject of our great English epic is not national; neither is that of the Germans, the Messias of Klopstock. The most distinguished work of that kind among the Italians, the Jerusalem of Tasso, is but partly national, though wholly catholic, and sufficiently interesting for the age of religious chivalry in which he lived. The Portuguese Lusiad, the great poem of the Romans, and the greater of the Greeks, were all reared on patriotic ground.

I know not whether the French of the present day persist in claiming for their country the honour of an epic poem: the work that went by that name while its celebrated author lived to support it by the strength of his own character (I speak of the Henriade of Voltaire) was altogether national. To whatever cause the fact must be attributed, I believe it will not be denied that the French epic poem remains yet to be written.

Mr. Barlow has been particularly happy in respect to his subject. The discovery of America is in itself a great action; but its importance is infinitely augmented by the consequences resulting from the discovery. These consequences comprise by far the most interesting portion of modern history; and their interest is strongly concentrated in his country, it being that part of the new world which has first manifested its own importance, by giving birth to a great and civilized nation.

The settlement therefore of the British colonies, the wars and revolutions through which they rose to independent states, that vast frame of federative republican government on which they now stand, and which in the eyes of our enthusiastic bard is to extend itself over the whole of North America, and give an example to the world, composes the principal part of the active scenery of the poem. But other and far more extensive views of human affairs, drawn from other countries, and from ages past, present, and future, are likewise placed beneath our eye, and form no inconsiderable portion of this magnificent

work; magnificent it certainly is beyond any thing which modern lite rature has to boast, except the Paradise Lost of Milton.

I will first present your readers with a general plan or analysis of the poem, and then proceed to give such extracts from it as shall offer as fair a view of its character for imagery and style, as can be comprised in a small compass.

The author in his preface makes some pertinent remarks on the nature of the subject, and the difficulties it presented as to the best mode of treating it. "The Columbiad (says he) is a patriotic poem; the subject is national and historical; thus far it must be interesting to my countrymen. But most of the events were so recent, so important, and so well known, as to render them inflexible to the hand of fiction. The poem therefore could not with propriety be modelled after that regular epic form which the more splendid works of this kind have taken, and on which their success is supposed in a great measure to depend. The attempt would have been highly injudicious; it must have diminished and debased a series of actions, which were really great in themselves, and which could not be disfigured without losing their interest." So far I agree with the poet; who seems to understand the real value of the rules of his art, too well to think himself obliged in all cases to follow them.

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He farther observes, "I shall enter into no discussion on the nature of the epopea, nor attempt to prove, by any latitude of reasoning, that I have written an epic poem.' Neither will I enter into such a discussion; but I must apply to the present work the sentiment of Addison, with regard to Paradise Lost, If it is not an epic poem, it is something better.

Mr. Barlow has dealt freely with mythological and allegorical personages; several of whom take conspicuous parts in the conduct of affairs. Hesper, as the guardian genius of the Western Continent, is made to play a great role; the continent is called after his name, Hesperia; and from the part he acts, he must be considered at least the second character in the poem. He is introduced near the beginning, and continues to the end; and there is no personage but Columbus whose existence seems so incorporated with the body of the work. Atlas, the guardian of Africa, is the elder brother of Hesper, according to the acCount of this mythological family which the author gives us in a note. Atlas appears but once in the course of the action; and it is to present us with as sublime a set of images as we have ever met with in poetry, including in his speech a most awful denunciation of vengeance on the people of America for the slavery of the Africans. These two brothers, with several River-Gods, and the demons of War, Cruelty, Inquisition, Frost, Famine, and Pestilence, compose the celestial actors who take charge of the hyperphysical part of the machinery.

The human characters are mostly real and known, some few of them fictitious; they are I believe more numerous than those employed in any other poem, not excepting the Iliad; and they are as much varied as the subject requires..

I will now proceed in my dissection or decomposition of the work. After a proper exordium and invocation to Freedom, a personage which the poet takes for his Muse, and promises to invoke no other, the poem opens by presenting us Columbus in prison at Valladolid, uttering a pathetic monologue on the services he had performed for the Spanish monarch, and on the ungrateful and barbarous manner in which they had been rewarded. In this situation Hesper appears to the illustrious

prisoner, and announces himself as the genius of the western hemisphere, and guardian of that continent, which he says is called Hesperia, but for the future shall be Columbia; as Europe was named after its adventurous discoverer, the daughter of Agenor, who first sailed thither from Phoenicia.

The approach of Hesper is attended with the splendour and eclat suitable to the occasion; light bursts into the dungeon; the prison walls tremble and disappear; and after a short address to Columbus, announcing his quality, and the object of his visit (which is no less than to lay before him the immense importance of his labours in the long train of consequences, to show him what fame he is to acquire, and to recal to his broken spirit the great moral principle, that the knowledge of the good we do is the only reward that can satisfy a benevolent mind for the sacrifices that great actions require), he conducts the hero to the Mount of Vision, which is reared in mid-sky over the western coast of Europe. Here Spain with its dungeons, Europe with all its kingdoms, Alps and Pyrenees, sink far behind and beneath their feet; while the Atlantic Ocean spreads out before them, and the continents of America draw majestically into view. The rest of the first book is Occupied in describing the great features of the twin continents of that hemisphere, south and north. It may now be said that the mountains and rivers of the new world have been better sung than those of the old. In describing the three great rivers, Maragnon, Lawrence, and Mississippi, on each of which I find fifty or sixty lines, there is a remarkable variety of scenery and sentiment, no recurrence to the same ideas, no confusion of character in their majestic streams. They are all animated, but their several portraits are kept as distinct as those of Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses; no part of any one of which would suit either of the others. Maragnon is presented in the act of overflowing his banks; after collecting from a vast range of continent the number of powerful rivers, who scem proud of becoming tributary to so great a fluvial sovereign, he thus continues his progress:

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Who, swell'd with growing conquest, wheels abroad,
Drains every land, and gathers all his flood;
Then far from clime to clime majestic goes,
Enlarging, widening, deepening as he flows;

Like heaven's broad milky way he shines alone,

Spreads o'er the globe its equatorial zone,

Weighs the cleft continent, and pushes wide
Its balanced mountains from each crumbling side.
Sire Ocean hears his proud Maragnon roar,

Moves up his bed, and seeks in vain the shore,
Then surging strong, with high and hoary tide,
Whelms back the stream and checks his rolling pride.
The Stream ungovernable foams with ire,

Climbs, combs tempestuous, and attacks the Sire;
Earth feels the conflict o'er her bosom spread,
Her isles and uplands hide their wood-crown'd head;
League after league from land to water change,
From realm to realm the seaborn monsters range;
Vast midland heights but pierce the liquid plain,
Old Andes tremble for their proud domain;
Till the fresh flood regains his forceful sway,
Drives back his father Ocean lash'd with spray ;
Whose ebbing waters lead the downward sweep,
And waves and trees and banks roll whirling to the deep.”

The river St. Lawrence affords a noble opportunity for depicting the breaking up of winter in a northern latitude, and Mr. Barlow has made the most of it. The tremendous struggle of the ice-crusted gulf in the conflict between the legions of frost and the tides of ocean, exhibits an awful picture; and then the islands of ice accumulating into floating mountains as they drive out to sea, and move to southern latitudes, supplying thirsty ships with fresh water, or crushing and sinking them in the deep, show that the poetic images of nature had not been exhausted by preceding bards. Here he takes occasion to deplore the loss of an American officer, whose ship was supposed to have perished in the ice.

The Mississippi is described with circumstances more interesting, though not more majestic, than the other great rivers. As it runs through a vast and fertile country, and that the author's country, of which he takes many occasions to predict the future importance and felicity, he dwells much on these ideas in marking the great features of that river.

"Strong in his march, and charged with all the fates,

Of regions pregnant with a hundred states,

He holds in balance, ranged on either hand,
Two distant Oceans and their sundering land,
Commands and drains the interior tracts that lie
Outmeasuring Europe's total breadth of sky."

Mentioning the principal tributary streams that lose themselves in this river, he brings in with propriety the character of the Missouri, which having run a much longer journey than the Mississippi, and acquired twice his magnitude, joins him with reluctance, being by that junction defrauded of his name:

"But chief of all his family of floods

Missouri marches through his world of woods;
He scorns to mingle with the filial train,
Takes every course to reach alone the main.

Orient awhile his bending sweep he tries,

Now drains the southern, now the northern skies,

Searches and sunders far the world's vast frame,

Reluctant joins the sire, and takes at last his name."

Here I quit the first book; but to return to it again for some examples of the descriptive powers of the author, and to express my disapprobation of some things I consider as defects.

The second book opens with a view of the native tribes of America, followed by some questions on the diversity of men, and the first peopling of that quarter of the world. I am then forced to pass in review the affecting scenes of Spanish devastation in Mexico and Peru. This leads to the interesting episode of Capac and Oella, the founders of the Peruvian empire, and parents of the race of Incas. The story is concisely told, though copiously enriched with incidents. It runs through a thousand lines, and displays a variety of heroic action, savage manners, sublime scenery, and beautiful sentiment. It ends with the third book.

The fourth brings us back to Europe, and exhibits the state of society there, and its progress till the settlement of North America. That expansion of mind, and freedom of inquiry, accompanied with VOL. I 3 H

ideas of honest industry, so necessary for the advancement of science and morals, which took place at that period, and which seemed to prepare the way for the great exhibition of human improvement, resulting from the British system of colonization, are represented, perhaps justly, as the immediate consequences of the geographical discoveries made by Columbus and his followers.

The poet has not forgotten that the religious persecutions of Europe were among the principal means of driving settlers to North America. These persecutions were concentrated and personified in the fiend Inquisition, who is pictured with all her attributes in a highly finished group, and with great strength of expression. The rise of the British maritime power is exhibited in its first great victory gained over the invincible armada of Spain. The view he then gives us of the great coloniarch, Walter Raleigh, conducting the first fleet of colonists to British America, is one of the most finished pictures we have ever seen. The exultation of Columbus on that occasion leads to some reflections on the spirit of liberty, which is represented as the foundation of morals, as well as of prosperity to a nation. Lord Delaware arrives with a reinforcement of emigrants. The moonlight scene as they enter the Chesapeake, the speech of the river-god Potomac, saluting his new masters, predicting their future greatness, and offering his own bank as the seat of their capital, are incidents arising out of this part of the subject, and are presented with that magnificence which serves to raise our expectations of the importance of what is to follow in the subsequent books.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh books, are chiefly occupied with war and revolution. The last of them terminates that memorable conflict with the mother country, which established the independence of the United States. On the planting of the British and French colonies, the energy of freedom which accompanied the former, compared with the feudal degradation attending the latter, are noticed with striking propriety.

The Indian wars which disturbed the early settlements are grouped in one general view. The French war is more detailed. Here the defeat of Braddock, the victory of Amherst, and the conquest of Canada by Wolfe, afford a greater variety of description. The subsequent peace is accompanied with an exhilarating view of colonial prosperity, and a great extension of territorial power, which prepares the reader for the wider scenes of havoc that are to follow in the war of independence. The action of this war is introduced with a pomp and dignity suitable to the grandeur of the object contended for. Darkness overspreads the continent. On the gradual return of light there is a view of Congress, and a notice of its leading members. The demon War strides over the ocean, leading on the English invasion. The general character of the war on the part of England, as the American poet chooses to represent it, is incendiary and barbarous. It begins with a wanton conflagration of towns, from Falmouth in the north, to Norfolk in the south. The battle of Bunker's-hill, the review of the American army, attended with many pathetic circumstances, the attack of Quebec, the death of Montgomery, the descent on New-York, and its conquest by the British, are well distributed and described. This terminates the fifth book.

The whole of this war being shown to Columbus in vision, appears but one continued action, occupying about one-fourth part of the poem; that is, from the middle of the fifth to the end of the seventh book. This action, though but one, is greatly variegated with incidents, afford

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