Most critics to-day prefer Halleck's lines _On the Death of Joseph
Rodman Drake_:--
"Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise."
This poem is simpler, less rhetorical, and the vehicle of more genuine
feeling than _Marco Bozzaris_.
The work of Drake and Halleck shows an advance in technique and imaginative
power. Their verse, unlike the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, does not
use the maiming cudgel, nor is it ponderous like Barlow's _Columbiad_ or
Dwight's _Conquest of Canaan_.
WASHINGTON IRVING, 1783-1859
[Illustration: WASHINGTON IRVING]
LIFE.--Irving was born in New York City in 1783, the year in which Benjamin
Franklin signed at Paris the treaty of peace with England after the
Revolutionary War. Irving's father, a Scotchman from the Orkney Islands,
was descended from De Irwyn, armor bearer to Robert Bruce. Irving's mother
was born in England, and the English have thought sufficiently well of her
son to claim that he belonged to England as much as to America. In fact, he
sometimes seemed to them to be more English than American, especially after
he had written something unusually good.
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