7i 



longer, when Irving had invested the Hudson with romance, and 

 Cooper had made our landscape part of the literary inheritance 

 of the world. Our prose-writers have interpreted our visible 

 country, and have invested certain spots with imagination so 

 that to visit them is to come under a spell; but our verse 

 writers, for the most part, have occupied themselves with 

 moral and philosophical ideas. Drake might have been the 

 exception. In his short career he revealed no remarkable 

 genius; he had no prophetic message for a chosen few; he had 

 none of those estranging gifts that set the great poets apart. 

 But he had the gift of lovableness, and he saw the poetic 

 possibilities in the daily world around him, in the conversation 

 of his friends and in the familiar landscape. The beauty that 

 he uncovered for us in the old town of New York, now in 

 the press of the vast city seems a fragile thing; but it has not 

 died. Today as we remember him we are aware of its fine 

 enchantment. 



Next came a scholarly paper by Dean Archibald L. Bouton 

 of the College of Arts and Pure Science of New York Uni- 

 versity, whose subject was : 



THE CULPRIT FAY: A CRITICISM. 



From today we go back ninety-nine years to the time when 

 in 1816 Drake wrote The Culprit Fay. In the same vear the 

 "North American Review" published Thanatopsis. This 

 double beginning of a new American poetry looked in two 

 directions. Long ago Thomas the Rymer wrote of two great 

 highways of poetry : 



O see ye not yon narrow road 



So thick beset with thorn and brier? 

 That is the Path of Righteousness, 



Though after it but few enquire. 



And see ye not that bonny road 



That winds about yon fernie brae? 

 That is the road to fair Elf-land 



Where you and I this night maun gae. 



