6 9 



been made by Burns and Scott. That Drake should have held 

 the other view shows not only his patriotism but his good 

 judgment. He did not celebrate the Hudson, after all, in The 

 Culprit Fay; — he did not take his own experiment seriously 

 enough; but at least he made the attempt, before Irving suc- 

 ceeded, to endow the river and its landscape with romance. 

 We may well suppose that the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and 

 Rip J 'an Winkle were easier to create after Drake's poem was 

 written and circulated among his friends. That Cooper 

 sin >uld have argued against the suitability of our landscape for 

 romantic treatment is at first astounding, since his prose was 

 shortly to endow that landscape with more romance than any 

 American verse ever conferred on it. But Cooper was slower 

 than Drake to see the possibilities for American art; his first 

 novel, Precaution, was deliberately English, and it was only 

 the remonstrances of his friends, as he tells us, that turned 

 him in his second book to an American subject. Were not 

 these remonstrances aided at least by the reputation of what 

 Drake's poem had tried to do? Would the American forests 

 and lakes have been so magically portrayed in the Deerslayer 

 and in the Last of the Mohicans, if Drake's fairy poem had 

 not come first? These questions cannot be answered; but to 

 ask them is a recognition of Drake's leadership in a field where 

 his great successors, his friends Irving and Cooper, have en- 

 joyed most of the fame. 



When we read the lines in which he expressed the hope that 

 the American scene would create its own poetry, we think how 

 many of his countrymen since have dreamt of a native world, 

 no longer seen through the glass of European traditions. The 

 emancipation that Emerson and Whitman proclaimed and pro- 

 moted, is heralded in these words of Drake's — ' 



Are there no scenes to touch the poet's soul? 

 No deeds of arms to wake the lordly strain? 

 Shall Hudson's billows unregarded roll? 

 Has Warren, has Montgomery died in vain? 

 Shame ! that while ever}' mountain stream and plain 

 Hath theme for truth's proud voice or fancy's wand, 



