Page:Fitz-Greene Halleck, A Memorial.djvu/22

14 Had the proud Hudson from her eyrie porch Quenched the lone splendor of her beacon torch, Yielded the trust her sister States consigned, And lost, with Arnold, hope for human kind.” The number of Croaker poems collected and published by the Bradford Club is fifty. Some of them did not appear with the original papers, but have been interpolated in this edition.

Mr. Halleck told me, that after Drake’s proposal to make a poetical firm, many of the Croaker pappers were written in this wise. He, or Drake, would furnish a draft of the poem, and that one or the other would suggest any alteration or enlargement of the idea; a closer clipping of the wings of fancy; a little epigrammatic spur upon the heel of a line.

I doubt very much whether I have a right to disclose the method by which Poets work in their workshops, but as I am only repeating Halleck’s ideas, I hold it to be no base betrayal of the craft. To show how delightful these joint labors were, to both these illustrious men, Halleck told me that, upon one occasion, Drake, after writing some stanzas and getting the proof from the printer, laid his cheek down upon the lines he had written, and looking at his fellow-poet, with beaming eyes, said, “O, Halleck, isn’t this happiness!”

Mr. Halleck rarely spoke of his own productions indeed, he seemed to think very lightly of them. Yet he had an unbounded admiration for Drake. Drake, on the other hand, did not think his own poems worth publishing or acknowledging. One day, on my speaking of “Fanny” to Mr. Halleck, he said, “Ah, I do not pride myself upon any thing in it except