"
[Illustration: FITZ GREENE HALLECK]
Such work indicates not only a diversified circle of readers, who were not
subject to the religious and political stress of earlier days, but it also
shows a desire to be entertained, which would have been promptly
discouraged in Puritan New England. We should not be surprised to find that
the literature of this period was swayed by the new demands, that it was
planned to entertain as well as to instruct, and that all the writers of
this group, with the exception of Bryant, frequently placed the chief
emphasis on the power to entertain.
Fortunately instruction often accompanies entertainment, as the following
lines from _The Croakers_ show:--
"The man who frets at worldly strife
Grows sallow, sour, and thin;
Give us the lad whose happy life
Is one perpetual grin,
He, Midas-like, turns all to gold."
Drake's best poem, which is entirely his own work, is _The Culprit Fay_,
written in 1816 when he was twenty-one years of age. This shows the
influence of the English romantic school, and peoples the Hudson River with
fairies. Before the appearance of this poem, nothing like these lines could
have been found in American verse:--
"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.
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