Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1 (wikilinked).djvu/133

122 Tom Moore. "If I did not hate as I ought the rabble to which they are opposed, I could not value as I do the spirit with which they defy it; and in learning from them what Americans can be, I but see with the more indignation what Americans are."


 * "Yet, yet forgive me, O you sacred few,
 * Whom late by Delaware's green banks I knew;
 * Whom, known and loved, through many a social eve
 * 'T was bliss to live with, and 't was pain to leave.


 * Oh, but for such, Columbia's days were done!
 * Rank without ripeness, quickened without sun,
 * Crude at the surface, rotten at the core,
 * Her fruits would fall before her spring were o'er."

If Columbia's days were to depend on "such," they were scarcely worth prolonging; for Dennie's genius was but the thin echo of an English classicism thin at its best. Yet Moore's words had value, for they gave a lifelike idea of the "sacred few" who sat with him, drinking deep, and reviling America because she could not produce poets like Anacreon and artists like Phidias, and still more because Americans cared little for Addisonian essays. An adventurer called John Davis, who published in London a book of American travels, mentioned in it that he too met the Philadelphia authors. "Dennie passed his morn­ings in the shop of Mr. Dickens, which I found the rendezvous of the Philadelphia sons of literature,—Blair [Linn], author of a poem called the 'Powers of Genius;' Ingersoll, known by a tragedy of which I forget the title; Stock, celebrated for his dramatic