Trumbull chose the law as a profession, and went to Boston to finish his studies in 1773. A clerk in the office of John Adams, who lodged with Gushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts House, could have read but little law in the midst of that political whirlwind which was driving men of every trade and profession into revolution. Boston stubbornly persevered in the resolution not to consume British goods, notwithstanding the efforts of the Addressers and Protesters and Tories generally, who preached their antiquated doctrines of passive obedience and divine right, and painted in their darkest colors the privation and suffering caused by the blockade. Trumbull joined the Whigs, pen in hand, and laid stoutly about him both in prose and verse. Then came the skirmish at Lexington, and all New England sprang to arms. Dwight joined the army as chaplain. Humphreys volunteered on Putnam's staff. Barlow served in the ranks at the Battle of White Plains; and then, after devoting his mind to theology for six weeks, accepted the position of chaplain in a Massachusetts regiment. The little knot of poets was broken up. One of them asked in mournful numbers,-- "Amid the roar of drums and guns, When meet again the Muses' sons?" They met again after the thunder and lightning were over, but in another place. New Haven saw the rising of the constellation; its meridian brilliancy shone upon Hartford. At the close of the war, the four poetical luminaries, as they were called by the "Connecticut Magazine and New Haven Gazette," hung up the sword in Hartford and grasped the lyre. The epidemic of verse broke out again. The four added to their number Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, a physician, Richard Alsop, a gentleman of much cultivation, and Theodore Dwight, a younger brother of Timothy. There were now seven stars of the first magnitude. Many other aspirants to a place in the heavens were necessarily excluded; among them, two are worthy of notice,--Noah Webster, who was already then and there meditating his method for teaching the American people to _mispel_, and Oliver Wolcott, afterward Secretary of the Treasury. Bound by the sweet influences of the Pleiades, Wolcott wrote a poem,--"The Judgment of Paris." His biographer, who has read it, has given his critical opinion that "it would be much worse than Barlow's epic, were it not much shorter."