Mr. Butler's Discourse. 199 



long resided among us, we should include one of the most 

 gifted female writers* and two of the first poets of the age.f 



But without plucking a leaf from the laureate brow of any 

 sister state, we may still twine for New-York the garland of 

 Poesy ; and though it be chiefly composed of wild flowers, 

 they are flowers of amaranthine hue and undying fragrance. 

 One of the sweetest has dropped, half- opened only, from a 

 broken stem ; and yet it has reflected on the soil which nour- 

 ished it, a glory that has crossed the broad Atlantic. Whoev- 

 er reads the London Quarterly Review, for November last, 

 will there find the taste and feeling of the British public, doing 

 homage, through a medium by which our country has often 

 been assailed, to the careless effusions of an untutored girl, 

 who never dreamed, in her wildest visions, thaUfce was to win 

 such honor to her native state. :J When I read this elegant and 

 spontaneous tribute to the intrinsic loveliness of truth, simpli- 

 city and virtue, I forgot every feeling of resentment I had har- 

 bored towards the conductors of that review. I could only 

 think of them as descendants, with us, from a common lineage 

 — the lineage of Spencer and Sidney, of Shakspeare and of 

 Milton — as brethren of the same family, speaking the same 

 language, worshiping at the same altar, and cherishing the 

 same emotions with ourselves. And when I remembered that 

 the pages of that distinguished journal were to be read, not only 

 by the millions for whose use it was primarily intended, but 

 wherever the energy of Britain had planted her power or con- 

 veyed her language, I could not but feel, how much the glory 

 of a nation depended on its authors ; and this feeling swelled 

 to an admiring estimate the superiority of letters, when I 

 reflected that the "native wood-notes" warbled by this child 

 of fancv, would probably do more, to make known and to 

 immortalize, the village of her birth, than the splendid victo- 

 ries achieved on its banks and waters ! 



