wii^son's literary writings 145 



"From the first dawn of dewy morning gray 

 In sweet confusion till the close of day." 



There is a lack of imagination in "The Invita- 

 tion" and an overbalancing of adjective with ad- 

 jective; in short it has the faults of the school 

 from which Wilson learned his measures. The 

 locusts rise in ''countless millions" to our ''wonder- 

 ing eyes." *'The richest harvests choke each 

 loaded field" ; one tires of this careful adjusting 

 of the scales, the even swing of the metre grows 

 monotonous, but the fault is in the taste of the age 

 rather than in the poet, and did we condemn a 

 writer for this. Pope and Goldsmith would be as 

 gross sinners as Wilson. The beauty of the poem 

 redeems it. True to nature, a just picture, rather 

 than an idealized impression, it stands out in 

 pleasing relief against the tediously pretentious 

 epics of the day, such as Barlow's "Columbiad," 

 or monotonous panegyrics of the order of Hum- 

 phrey's "Happiness of America." It is not a great 

 poem, certainly, but it is full of beauty and inter- 

 est, and, when considered historically in view of 

 what was being produced in America at that pe- 

 riod, it has its own importance. 



"A Rural Walk" is another descriptive nature 

 poem of slightly greater length than "The Invita- 

 tion." It is written in four-stressed iambic quat- 

 rains with alternate rhyme instead of the suc- 

 cessive pentameters of the other poem. Though 

 it has some of the fresh beauty of the other piece 

 yet it is far less striking in the richness of the 

 pictures drawn and in the aptness of poetical ex- 

 10 



