148 ALEXANDER WILSON: POET-NATURALIST 



"What though profuse in many a patriot's praise 

 We boast a Barlow's soul — exalting lays ; 

 An Humphreys, blessed with Homer's nervous glow, 

 And Freedom's friend and champion in Freneau; 

 Yet Nature's charms that bloom so lovely here, 

 Unhailed arrive, unheeded disappear." 



These were the bards that now fired his emula- 

 tion and this the theme which should inspire his 

 pen. It is in this historical setting that we must 

 consider Wilson before we conjecture his place in 

 American literature. 



Joel Barlow, David Humphreys, Timothy 

 Dwight, John Trumbull, and Philip Freneau were 

 the poets whose works were best known among 

 the native writers. The first three were authors 

 of long, pretentious, but hopelessly dreary works, 

 with no distinctive style to mark one from the 

 other. Their verses were counterparts of the 

 pompous lines of Wilson's own "Foresters," and 

 like that piece are best remembered only histori- 

 cally. Trumbull really produced a verse full of 

 a rough, ready wit, but he was certainly no poet. 

 Freneau was the one poet of this group, and 

 wrote a few nature poems of simple, real beauty. 



There were some little lyrics being produced of 

 unusual beauty by John Shaw, Richard Dana, and 

 Richard Wilde, but they were exceedingly few in 

 number. Wilson in his nature poems most re- 

 sembled Dana and Freneau, and "The Blue- 

 bird" and "The Osprey" may justly claim a place 

 with Freneau's "Wild Honeysuckle" and "To a 

 Honey Bee," and Dana's "Little Beach-bird": 

 delicate little poems all of them, that were to be 

 forerunners of the nature poems of Whittier and 



