The Connecticut Wits, and Other Essays — John Shaqi
The Connecticut Wits, and Other EssaysBeers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)
History
The Connecticut Wits, and Other Essays
Beers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)
Connecticut -- Intellectual life; English literature -- History and criticism
See Bushnell’s strong creative genius, fraught
With all th’ assembled powers of skillful thought,
His mystic vessel plunge beneath the waves
And glide through dark retreats and coral caves!
Dr. Holmes, who knew more about Yale poets than they know about each
other, has rescued one line from “Greenfield Hill.” “The last we see of
snow,” he writes, in his paper on “The Seasons,” “is, in the language of
a native poet,
The lingering drift behind the shady wall.
This is from a bard more celebrated once than now, Timothy Dwight, the
same from whom we borrowed the piece we used to speak, beginning (as we
said it),
Columby, Columby, to glory arise!
The line with the drift in it has stuck in my memory like a feather in
an old nest, and is all that remains to me of his ‘Greenfield Hill.’”
* * * * *
As President of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, Dr. Dwight, by his
sermons, addresses, and miscellaneous writings, his personal influence
with young men, and his public spirit, was a great force in the
community. I have an idea that his “Travels in New England and New
York,” posthumously published in 1821–1822, in four volumes, will
survive all his other writings. I can recommend Dwight’s “Travels” as a
really entertaining book, and full of solid observation.
Of all the wooden poetry of these Connecticut bards, David Humphreys’s
seems to me the woodenest,—big patriotic verse essays on the model of
the “Essay on Man”; “Address to the Armies of the United States”; “On
the Happiness of America”; “On the Future Glory of the United States”;
“On the Love of Country”; “On the Death of George Washington,” etc. Yet
Humphreys was a most important figure. He was plenipotentiary to
Portugal and Spain, and a trusted friend of Washington, from whom,
perhaps, he caught that stately deportment which is said to have
characterized him. He imported a hundred merino sheep from Spain,
landing them from shipboard at his native Derby, then a port of entry on
the lordly Housatonic. He wrote a dissertation on merino sheep, and also
celebrated the exploit in song. The Massachusetts Agricultural Society
gave him a gold medal for his services in improving the native breed.
But if these sheep are even remotely responsible for Schedule K, it
might be wished that they had remained in Spain, or had been as the
flocks of Bo-Peep. Colonel Humphreys died at New Haven in 1818. The
college owns his portrait by Stuart, and his monument in Grove Street
cemetery is dignified by a Latin inscription reciting his titles and
achievements, and telling how, like a second Jason, he brought the
_auream vellerem_ from Europe to Connecticut. Colonel Humphreys’s works
were handsomely published at New York in 1804, with a list of
subscribers headed by their Catholic Majesties, the King and Queen of
Spain, and followed by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and numerous dukes
and chevaliers.
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