Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/76

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS they wrote, outside the judicial reports. Neither seems to have had any sacred fury in his nature that was not evoked by patriotism. That which Judge Joseph Hopkinson gave out in "Hail, Columbia," was of a sufficiently humdrum kind. He had the music of the "President's March" as a copy before him, and his verses are little better or worse than the air. The Judge was born in 1770, and was a spruce young lawyer in the summer of 1798, when war with France seemed imminent, and Congress was holding an excited session at Philadelphia. He wrote his ode at a sitting, for the benefit of an actor, who had vainly exhausted the poets of the theatrical company, in an effort to adopt words to the stilted march then most in favor. Hopkinson was appealed to on Saturday, wrote the song on Sunday, heard it from a stage-box on the next evening; and it made a great sensation. The citizens joined in the chorus night after night, and the jurist-author found himself renowned for life by a rude homily upon Columbia in prose chopped to the metre. He was afterward a member of Congress, then a Judge of the United States District Court, and died within the memory of most of us at the good old age of seventy-two.

Francis Scott Key swept the chords more tunefully in his "Star-Spangled Banner," which has merits that would give it a leasehold, independently of the spirited music to which it was composed. Its obvious rhymes and adjectives—"haughty host," "dread silence," "foul footsteps' pollution," etc., are little suited to the naturalism of our later day, but the burden, [62]