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"None knew thee but to love thee, nor named thee but to 

 praise," says the poet-friend whose name is inseparable from 

 his. We have long since accepted this tender, if somewhat 

 transparent, estimate of Drake; he enjoys a clear fame; he is 

 a crystalline spirit. What he owes to these lines of Halleck's 

 we observe when we reflect how earthly in comparison seems 

 Halleck's memory, who was a far abler poet, but who lacked 

 a poetic epitaph to transfigure him. This quality of Drake's 

 fame — its spirit-like clearness — is derived in part at least from 

 his best known poem, The Culprit Fay, the title of which, even 

 if one knows no more of it, evokes a disembodied world, and 

 the felicity of which, if one has read it, seems curiously blood- 

 less. But all that we can recover of the actual Drake, even 

 without the testimony of this poem, bears out Halleck's praise. 

 Drake was essentially a youthful poet, a poet of joy and 

 enthusiasm, a beauty-lover; he was also, what many young 

 poets have not been, personally admirable and loveable, and 

 he had much common sense. He was, moreover, typical of 

 American poets in that his life, though short, was happy. To 

 appreciate his achievements we have only to study him through 

 the eyes of his admiring friends and acquaintances. 



The first observation that should be made of his work is 

 that, though he wrote verses from his very childhood, he 

 usually wrote, as one might say, accidentally or occasionally. 

 It fits well with our conception of him as an untroubled nature 

 that he was urged to write by no unquenchable, passionate 

 flame. His poems almost always were suggested or stimu- 

 lated by some social encounter, or by the small talk of friend- 

 ship. If it is true that his earliest composition, at the age of 

 five, was a versified conundrum, a critic who looks for omens 

 might remark that conundrums are preeminently sociable. 

 The Culprit Fay, as we have often been told, arose out of a 

 conversation in 1816, "in which Drake, de Kay, Cooper, the 

 novelist, and Halleck, were speaking of the Scottish streams 

 and their adaptation to the uses of poetry by their numerous 

 romantic associations. Cooper and Halleck maintained that 



