The soul of man stirred by such ideals, and successful in realizing them beyond all dreams, struggled for utterance. It is such upheavals in human society that make poets and bring outbursts of song and periods in the history of literature. But there was no burst of song in America; instead there followed one of the most pathetic spectacles in all literary history--a people with a vision that transported them into the clouds, yet powerless through environment and early education to transmute that vision into song. The South, thrilled by the new spirit, turned it at once into action, and took the leadership in war and statesmanship. New England lifted up her voice, but she could speak only through the medium of old spiritual conceptions and worn-out poetic forms. A young Connecticut parson, thrilled through and through, pours his enthusiasm into an epic of the wars of Joshua done in the heroics of Pope; a brilliant Boston lad would sing of "War and Washington," but he must set it to the tune of Dryden; and a gifted Connecticut satirist, overflowing with the true poetic spirit, is content simply to add new American stanzas to "Hudibras." With all her rhymers and all her inspiration, New England gave forth not a single original note. It was the repeating of the old spectacle of a heavenly anthem sung unto shepherds,--unto those utterly unable to give it utterance. We see them, however, struggling heroically with the burden. From 1774, when Dwight completed his "Conquest of Canaan," "the first piece of this kind ever attempted in this country," as he observed in his preface, until 1808, which ends the period with Barlow's "Columbiad"--the "Polyolbion" of American poetry--the years are strewn thick with the wrecks of epics. Every poet of the era felt his soul burn with the epic fire. Charles Brockden Brown, when only sixteen, had started no less than three of these Homeric efforts: one on the discovery of America, and one each on the conquests of Mexico and Peru. It was our heroic era, but it yielded almost nothing of value. Mere exaltation availeth little unless it be grounded either upon genius or long-continued culture. America, however, was not without her genius. Before Dwight and Barlow and Trumbull had written a line, Freneau at Princeton was planning epics American in scene and spirit. He had dreamed, over his Virgil, of a greater Aeneas who had sailed into the pathless West to discover a new world, and to plant there the seeds of a greater than Rome; he had translated with beating heart the words of Seneca: "The time shall come, when numerous years are past, When ocean shall unloose the bands of things, And an extended region rise at last; "And Typhis shall disclose the mighty land Far, far away, where none have rov'd before; Nor shall the world's remotest region be Gibraltar's rock, or Thule's savage shore."