It is odd to come upon familiar place-names swollen to epic pomp. There is Danbury, for example, which one associates with the manufacture of hats and a somewhat rowdy annual fair. In speaking of the towns set on fire by the British, the poet thus exalteth Danbury, whose flames were visible from native Redding:— Norwalk expands the blaze; o’er Redding hills High flaming Danbury the welkin fills. Esopus burns, New York’s deliteful fanes And sea-nursed Norfolk light the neighboring plains. But Barlow’s best poem was “Hasty Pudding,” a mock-heroic after the fashion of Philips’s “Cider,” and not, I think, inferior to that. One couplet, in particular, has prevailed against the tooth of time:— E’en in thy native regions how I blush To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush! This poem was written in 1792 in Savoy, whither Barlow had gone to stand as deputy to the National Convention. In a little inn at Chambéry, a bowl of _polenta_, or Indian meal pudding, was set before him, and the familiar dish made him homesick for Connecticut. You remember how Dr. Holmes describes the dinners of the young American medical students in Paris at the _Trois Frères_; and how one of them would sit tinkling the ice in his wineglass, “saying that he was hearing the cowbells as he used to hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset.” THE SINGER OF THE OLD SWIMMIN’ HOLE MANY years ago I said to one of Walt Whitman’s biographers: “Whitman may, as you claim, be the poet of democracy, but he is not the poet of the American people. He is the idol of a literary _culte_. Shall I tell you who the poet of the American people is just at present? He is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana.” Riley used to become quite blasphemous when speaking of Whitman. He said that the latter had begun by scribbling newspaper poetry of the usual kind—and very poor of its kind—which had attracted no attention and deserved none. Then he suddenly said to himself: “Go to! I will discard metre and rhyme and write something startlingly eccentric which will make the public sit up and take notice. I will sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, and the world will say—as in fact it did—‘here is a new poetry, lawless, virile, democratic. It is so different from anything hitherto written, that here must be the great American poet at last.’” Now, I am not going to disparage old Walt. He was big himself, and he had an extraordinary feeling of the bigness of America with its swarming multitudes, millions of the plain people, whom God must have loved, said Lincoln, since he made so many of them. But all this in the mass. As to any dramatic power to discriminate among individuals and characterize them singly, as Riley does, Whitman had none. They are all alike, all “leaves of grass.”