8. On the other hand, since we can make no pretence to the possession of a tragic drama, and none to a truly national epic, it may safely be affirmed that our poetry has risen to its greatest heights in meditative and religious lyric; in meditative verse on nature, that is, such “nature-poetry” as assumes the Divine immanence throughout the world of objective reality--in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; and in the religious lyric, that is, in a few of our hymns. _The Earlier Poets._--We commence this survey of American poetry at the date to which the sections adapted from Tyler have conducted the literature as a whole, namely, the year 1784. The chief poets of the Revolutionary period, Barlow, Dwight, Trumbull, and Freneau, all lived well on into the next century, Barlow, in fact, being the only one of these who did not survive the War of 1812. In Barlow’s day, heroics were the fashion. His _magnum opus_, a rhymed epic on the discovery of America, had already taken shape in manuscript as early as 1781; in 1787 it appeared as “The Vision of Columbus”; by 1807 it had grown into the ponderous “Columbiad.” It is an uninspired, pseudo-classical narrative, schematically and metrically correct, but organically lifeless, full of the “printer’s devil personification” so characteristic of its time. With gratuitous industry, as it supplies all the lineage of personified abstractions like “Discord,” so it begins the history of America at Creation, fetches the story down through colonial times to the Revolution, and includes in its sweep a glance at events yet to come. Similarly in his mock-heroic, “The Hasty Pudding” (1793), which is touched with fancy and is in every way more attractive than his “Columbiad,” Barlow commences with the growth and harvesting of the maize which is to furnish the flour. Dwight, who was at first a tutor, but from 1795 until his death, in 1817, president, of Yale College, in 1785 brought forth a Biblical epic entitled “The Conquest of Canaan,” in which the narrative of Exodus is diversified by allusions to heroes in the American War of Independence, and by a tale of romantic love superadded. Dwight was a diligent reader of Pope and Goldsmith, but he did not confine his interest to the eighteenth century; he knew the enchantment of the poets’ poet, Spenser; and like Thomson he could at times, as in “Greenfield Hill,” look with his own eyes at things about him. He was a friend of Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow; on occasion he penned a bitter invective. But as a writer he will be remembered for his noble hymn, whose second stanza commences, I love Thy Church, O God, which is the key-note of his life. Trumbull, though he lived to a great age (1750-1831), had completed his remarkable mock-heroic, “M’Fingal,” prior to 1784; hence at this point he interests us chiefly on account of his friendship with Dwight and Barlow, and his effect on later satirists.