57 



of our Borough. I have read it again this week, a well- 

 bound volume given my wife in her girlhood, with a hundred 

 illustrations and more than a hundred well printed pages. It 

 claims to tell the story of a culprit fay. But the real, the 

 essential story, reveals that a youth but a little over twenty 

 years of age, living here, had come to know nature in count- 

 less beautiful forms, had communed with nature as living in 

 each flower and varied leaf, in every winged thing in the air, 

 every creeping thing in the earth, every swimming thing in 

 the water, till each became alive with a fairy soul, or with a 

 fairy tenant of the material shape which seemed to him, as it 

 were, a living soul. 



Upon another shelf of my library for near a half century 

 have stood two larger volumes, printed in New York just 

 sixty years ago, bearing the title " American Literature," by 

 Duyckinck. This cyclopedia gives eleven or twelve of its 

 closely printed columns to Joseph Rodman Drake. Nearly all 

 of the space is devoted to telling of how this young man gave 

 voice to nature. The little poem from which I have repeated 

 only four lines furnishes, for nearly every one of its forty- 

 eight lines, a subject for a picture which might be transferred 

 by a skilful painter of landscapes to his canvas. 



Drake revealed himself more truly when he sang of nature 

 than when he wrote of the flag of Amercia. His country was 

 fighting Great Britain from the time he was seventeen till he 

 was twenty, when the war ended with the Battle of New 

 Orleans. Little of the imagery that is called forth by war, 

 when judged by men who are not affected by temporary in- 

 sanity, can be pronounced beautiful. Here was an ensign 

 made of woven pieces of various colors and shapes, called the 

 American flag. What is its real symbolism? Its thirteen 

 stripes stand for the thirteen self-governing colonies on the 

 Atlantic shore. The stars, however many, stand both for the 

 States into which these were transformed and all the new 

 States that were added thereto. The pure hearts required of 

 their citizens are symbolized by the color of pure white; the 



