"For any man with half an eye What stands before him can espy; But optics sharp it needs, I ween, To see what is not to be seen." "But as some muskets so contrive it As oft to miss the mark they drive at, And though well aimed at duck or plover, Bear wide and kick their owners over." "No man e'er felt the halter draw With good opinion of the law." The last two verses have passed into immortality as a proverb. Perhaps a few other grains of corn might be picked out of these hundred and seventy pages of chaff. Dr. Dwight staked his fame on "The Conquest of Canaan," an attempt to make an Iliad out of the Old Testament. Eleven books; nine thousand six hundred and seventy-two dreary verses, full of battles and thunderstorms; peopled with Irad, Jabin, Hanniel, Hezron, Zimri, and others like them, more colorless and shadowy than the brave Gyas and the brave Cloanthus. Not a line of this epic has survived. Shorter and much better is "Greenfield Hill," a didactic poem, composed, the author said, to amuse and to instruct in economical, political, and moral sentiments. Greenfield was, for a time, the scene of the Doctor's professional labors. His descriptions of New England character, of the prosperity and comfort of New England life, are accurate, but not vivid. The book is full of good sense, but there is little poetry in it. True to the literary instincts of the Pleiads, he shines with reflected light, and works after Thomson and Goldsmith so closely that in many passages imitation passes into parody. Like Timotheus of Greece, Timothy of Connecticut "to his breathing flute and sounding lyre Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire." He wrote a war chant; he wrote psalms; and there is a song in the "Litchfield Collection" in which he attempts to kindle soft desire. Here is an extract:-- No longer, then, fair maid, delay The promised scenes of bliss, Nor idly give another day The joys assigned to this. "Quit, then, oh, quit, thou lovely maid! Thy bashful virgin pride,"-- and so on sings the Doctor. Who would have thought that "profound Solomon would tune a jig, Or Nestor play at pushpin with the boys," as Shakspeare has it? who would have expected erotic tints and Epicurean morality from the author of "The Conquest of Canaan," and of four volumes of orthodox and weighty theology? The "Ode to Columbia," "Columbia! Columbia! to glory arise, The queen of the world and the child of the skies!" written when Dwight was a chaplain in the Revolutionary Army, is probably more known to the moderns than any of his poetical efforts. It is a vision of the future greatness of the new-born nation,--short, spirited, and finished with more care than he was in the habit of giving to his verses. In like manner the brave and burly Colonel "Humphreys charmed the listening throng; Sweetly he sang amid the clang of arms."