The fast historical event of national importance was the American Revolution. Amid the bitter years of want, of suffering, and of war; few men tried to write anything beautiful. Life was harsh and stirring and this note was echoed in all the literature. As a result we have narrative and political poetry, such as "The Battle of the Kegs" and "A Fable," dealing almost entirely with events and aiming to arouse military ardor. In "The Ballad of Nathan Hale," the musical expression of bravery, pride, and sympathy raises the poem so far above the rhymes of their period that it will long endure as the most memorable poetic expression of the Revolutionary period. Poetry was still a thing of the moment, an avocation, not dignified by receiving the best of a man. With William Cullen Bryant came a change. He told our nation that in the new world as well as in the old some men should live for the beautiful. Everything in nature spoke to him in terms of human life. Other poets saw the relation between their own lives and the life of the flowers and the birds, but Bryant constantly expressed this relationship. The concluding stanza of "To a Waterfowl" is the most perfect example of this characteristic, but it underlies also the whole thought of his youthful poem "Thanatopsis" (A View of Death). If we could all read the lives of our gentians and bobolinks as he did, there would be more true poetry in America. Modern thinkers urge us to step outside of ourselves into the lives of others and by our imagination to share their emotions; this is no new ambition in America; since Bryant in "The Crowded Street" analyzes the life in the faces he sees. Until the early part of the nineteenth century American poetry dealt mainly with the facts of history and the description of nature. A new element of fancy is prominent in Joseph Rodman Drake's "The Culprit Fay." It dances through a long narrative with the delicacy of the fay himself.