the possible exception of his novel, the _Dutchman's Fireside_, 1831.

A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, a young poet of
great promise, who died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's
patriotic lyric, the _American Flag_, is certainly the most spirited
thing of the kind in our poetic literature, and greatly superior to
such national anthems as _Hail Columbia_ and the _Star-Spangled
Banner_. His _Culprit Fay_, published in 1819, was the best poem that
had yet appeared in America, if we except Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, which
was three years the elder. The _Culprit Fay_ was a fairy story, in
which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to throw the glamour of
poetry about the Highlands of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem
was fanciful rather than imaginative; but it is prettily and even
brilliantly fanciful, and has maintained its popularity to the present
time. Such verse as the following--which seems to show that Drake had
been reading Coleridge's _Christabel_, published three years
before--was something new in American poetry:

"The winds are whist and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid,
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katydid,
And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will,
Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings
Ever a note of wail and woe,
Till morning spreads her rosy wings,
And earth and sky in her glances glow."

Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American bird, and not