My earliest knowledge of this literary coterie was derived from an article in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for February, 1865, “The Pleiades of Connecticut.” The “Pleiades,” to wit, were John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, and Theodore Dwight. The tone of the article was ironic. “Connecticut is pleasant,” it said, “with wooded hills and a beautiful river; plenteous with tobacco and cheese; fruitful of merchants, missionaries, peddlers, and single women,—but there are no poets known to exist there . . . the brisk little democratic state has turned its brains upon its machinery . . . the enterprising natives can turn out any article on which a profit can be made—except poetry.” Massachusetts has always been somewhat condescending towards Connecticut’s literary pretensions. Yet all through that very volume of the _Atlantic_, from which I quote, run Mrs. Stowe’s “Chimney Corner” papers and Donald Mitchell’s novel, “Doctor Johns”; with here and there a story by Rose Terry and a poem by Henry Brownell. Nay, in an article entitled “Our Battle Laureate,” in the May number of the magazine, the “Autocrat” himself, who would always have his fling at Connecticut theology and Connecticut spelling and pronunciation (“Webster’s provincials,” forsooth! though _pater ipse_, the Rev. Abiel, had been a Connecticut orthodox parson, a Yale graduate, and a son-in-law of President Stiles),—the “Autocrat,” I say, takes off his hat to my old East Hartford neighbor, Henry Howard Brownell. He begins by citing the paper which I have been citing: “How came the Muses to settle in Connecticut? . . . But the seed of the Muses has run out. No more Pleiades in Hartford . . .”; and answers that, if the author of the article asks Nathanael’s question, putting Hartford for Nazareth, he can refer him to Brownell’s “Lyrics of a Day.” “If Drayton had fought at Agincourt, if Campbell had held a sabre at Hohenlinden, if Scott had been in the saddle with Marmion, if Tennyson had charged with the six hundred at Balaclava, each of these poets might possibly have pictured what he said as faithfully and as fearfully as Mr. Brownell has painted the sea fights in which he took part as a combatant.”