This habit of apotheosising our literary pioneers was a most indiscriminating one. Upon _all_ who wrote, the applause was plastered with an impartiality really refreshing. Of course, the system favored the dunces at the expense of true merit; and, since there existed a certain fixed standard of exaggerated commendation to which all were adapted after the fashion of Procrustes, it is clear that the most meritorious required _the least stretching_,—in other words, that, although all were much over-rated, the deserving were over-rated in a less degree than the unworthy. Thus with Brainard:—a man of indisputable genius, who, in any more discriminate system of panegyric, would have been long ago bepuffed into Demi-Deism; for if “M’Fingal,” for example, is in reality what we have been told, the commentators upon Trumbull, as a matter of the simplest consistency, should have exalted into the seventh heaven of poetical dominion the author of the many graceful and vigorous effusions which are now lying, in a very neat little volume, before us.[3] Yet we maintain that even these effusions have been overpraised, and materially so. It is not that Brainard has not written poems which may rank with those of any American, with the single exception of Longfellow—but that the general merit of our whole national Muse has been estimated too highly, and that the author of “The Connecticut River” has, individually, shared in the exaggeration. No poet among us has composed what would deserve the tithe of that amount of approbation so innocently lavished upon Brainard. But it would not suit our purpose just now, and in this department of the Magazine, to enter into any elaborate analysis of his productions. It so happens, however, that we open the book at a brief poem, an examination of which will stand us in good stead of this general analysis, since it is by this very poem that the admirers of its author are content to swear—since it is the fashion to cite it as his best—since thus, in short, it is the chief basis of his notoriety, if not the surest triumph of his fame. We allude to “The Fall of Niagara,” and shall be pardoned for quoting it in full. The thoughts are strange that crowd into my brain While I look upward to thee. It would seem As if God poured thee from his hollow hand, And hung his brow upon thine awful front, And spoke in that loud voice which seemed to him Who dwelt in Patmos for his Saviour’s sake The “sound of many waters,” and had bade Thy flood to chronicle the ages back And notch his centuries in the eternal rocks.