_Joseph Rodman Drake._--Of great promise likewise, but cut short by a premature demise, was the career of Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820). Drake was a precocious spirit, working swiftly, and valuing his easily produced and quickly moving verses perhaps a little below their true worth. A friend of Halleck, and like Halleck under the sway of the novelist Fenimore Cooper, he reveals also how familiar he was with the half-luminous, half-misty style of Coleridge. In Drake’s happiest attempt, “The Culprit Fay” (1816), he aimed to find an utterance for the poetry of the great American rivers, hitherto neglected, as he and his friends decided, in the native literature. The outcome of a discussion between Drake, Freneau, and Cooper, this fanciful story is nevertheless replete with the cadences of Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816), however difficult it may be to explain the resemblance. Needless to say, “The Culprit Fay” could not make a general appeal like that of “The American Flag,” by the same author--a rhetorical and manneristic piece that, up to a few years ago, was on the lips of every American school-boy: When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there. Set them where? In spite of the fact that it is grandiose and unprecise, “The American Flag” may yet be yielded an advantage in point of style over Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” with which one naturally compares it. _Fitz-Greene Halleck._--The final quatrain of “The American Flag” was written by Drake’s associate in the “Croaker Papers,” Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867). Halleck was a witty poet, who aimed at no lasting fame, but humorously chastised the passing follies of New York society, much as Lord Byron scourged society in London. He wrote clearly and gracefully, and was greatly overpraised in his time. His satiric poem “Fanny” (1819) was highly popular. “Marco Bozzaris,” a lyric recital of the Byronic type, portrayed with a good deal of life, but with a suspicion of rant too, a dramatic incident in the struggle of modern Greece against the Turk. His tribute to Burns (1827) was warmly approved by the Scottish bard’s sister: “nothing finer,” she said in 1855, “has been written about Robert.” “Red Jacket” and the monody on “Drake” also belong to Halleck’s early period. In fact, his main activity as a poet was confined to the ten or eleven years commencing with the death of Drake (1820). As Allston was the first of our poets to arouse much admiration abroad, so Halleck was the first to receive notable posthumous honours at home. In general, he owed a large measure of his inspiration to Washington Irving.