wii^son's ute;rary writings 143 



"The Foresters" was Wilson's most preten- 

 tious poem; it was by no means his best. Its 

 conscious attempt at the grandiose style would 

 have quite spoiled it, had not the very nature of 

 the poem been impracticable. It is a long, tire- 

 some piece of twenty-two hundred and nineteen 

 lines, with a subject no more exciting than a hunt- 

 ing expedition to Niagara Falls. Wilson himself 

 expected great things of it, and declared to his 

 nephew William Duncan that if it did not prove 

 to be good he would despair of ever producing 

 anything that would. Its success in book form, 

 however, was poor, as it deserved to be. The at- 

 tempt throughout the poem seems to be almost 

 an endeavor to acquire the stately, splendid style 

 of Milton, who is several times mentioned in the 

 piece. But imagine a writer striving to engraft 

 the grandeur of "Paradise Lost" on a poem writ- 

 ten in rhyming heroic couplets, descriptive of a 

 bird-hunting expedition! The greater portion of 

 the poem is cumbersome and stiff, and at times 

 the style reaches the extreme of bombast and 

 bathos. There are lines of beauty, however, 

 throughout the piece. A lovely picture of au- 

 tumn begins with the forty-first line and at line 

 twelve hundred and seventy-five there is a good 

 passage representing an Indian's lament over his 

 lost land. These few well-written passages here 

 and there are unable to redeem the poem, how- 

 ever, for the larger part of it is a dreary waste of 

 words. 



The poem on Burns's portrait is in the main 

 good, but its chief interest is biographical. It 



