Part 13 (1/2)

From morn to night here noise and riot reign; From night to morn 'tis noise and roar again.

Not a flattering picture, truly, and yet no doubt a trustworthy one, of this period in Oswego's history.

But we must hurry along with the poet to his destination, although the temptation to linger with him in this part of the journey is great.

Indeed, ”The Foresters” is a historic chronicle of no slight value.

There is no doubting the fidelity of its pictures of the state of nature and of man along this storied route as seen by its author at the beginning of the century; while his poetic philosophizing is now shrewd, now absurd, but always ardently American in tone.

Our foresters undertook to coast along the Ontario sh.o.r.e in their frail ”Niagara”; narrowly escaped swamping, and were picked up by

A friendly sloop for Queenstown Harbor bound,

where they arrived safely, after being gloriously seasick. It was the season of autumn gales. A few days before a British packet called the Speedy, with some twenty or thirty persons on board, including a judge advocate, other judges, witnesses and an Indian prisoner, had foundered and every soul perished. No part of the Speedy was afterwards found but the pump, which Wilson says his captain picked up and carried to Queenston.

Wilson had moralized, philosophized and rhapsodized all the way from the Schuylkill. His verse, as he approaches the Mecca of his wanderings, fairly palpitates with expectation and excitement. He was not a bard to sing in a majestic strain, but his description of the falls and their environment is vivid and of historic value. As they tramped through the forest,--

Heavy and slow, increasing on the ear, Deep through the woods a rising storm we hear.

Th' approaching gust still loud and louder grows, As when the strong northeast resistless blows, Or black tornado, rus.h.i.+ng through the wood, Alarms th' affrighted swains with uproar rude.

Yet the blue heavens displayed their clearest sky, And dead below the silent forests lie; And not a breath the lightest leaf a.s.sailed; But all around tranquillity prevailed.

”What noise is that?” we ask with anxious mien, A dull salt-driver pa.s.sing with his team.

”Noise? noise?--why, nothing that I hear or see But Nagra Falls--Pray, whereabouts live ye?”

This touch of realism ushers in a long and over-wrought description of the whole scene. The ”cras.h.i.+ng roar,” he says,

---- bade us kneel and Time's great G.o.d adore.

Whatever may have been his emotions, his adjectives are sadly inadequate, and his verse devoid of true poetic fervor. More than one of his descriptive pa.s.sages, however, give us those glimpses of conditions past and gone, which the historian values. For instance, this:

High o'er the wat'ry uproar, silent seen, Sailing sedate, in majesty serene, Now midst the pillared spray sublimely lost, Swept the gray eagles, gazing calm and slow, On all the horrors of the gulf below; Intent, alone, to sate themselves with blood, From the torn victims of the raging flood.

Wilson was not the man to mistake a bird; and many other early travelers have testified to the former presence of eagles in considerable numbers, haunting the gorge below the falls in quest of the remains of animals that had been carried down stream.

Moore, as we have seen, denounced the country for its lack of

That lingering radiance of immortal mind

which so inspires the poet in older lands. He was right in his fact, but absurd in his fault-finding. It has somewhere been said of him, that Niagara Falls was the only thing he found in America which overcame his self-importance; but we must remember his youth, the flatteries on which he had fed at home and the crudities of American life at that time. For a quarter of a century after Tom Moore's visit there was much in the cra.s.s a.s.sertiveness of American democracy which was as ridiculous in its way as the Old-World ideas of cla.s.s and social distinctions were in their way--and vastly more vulgar and offensive. Read, in evidence, Mrs.

Trollope and Capt. Basil Hall, two of America's severest and sincerest critics. It should be put down to Tom Moore's credit, too, that before he died he admitted to Was.h.i.+ngton Irving and to others that his writings on America were the greatest sin of his early life.[80]

Like Moore, Alexander Wilson felt America's lack of a poet; and, like Barlow and Humphreys and Freneau and others of forgotten fame, he undertook--like them again, unsuccessfully--to supply the lack. There is something pathetic--or grotesque, as we look at it--in the patriotic efforts of these commonplace men to be great for their country's sake.

To Europe's sh.o.r.es renowned in deathless song,

asks Wilson,

Must all the honors of the bard belong?

And rural Poetry's enchanting strain Be only heard beyond th' Atlantic main?

Yet Nature's charms that bloom so lovely here, Unhailed arrive, unheeded disappear; While bare black heaths and brooks of half a mile Can rouse the thousand bards of Britain's Isle.

There, scarce a stream creeps down its narrow bed, There scarce a hillock lifts its little head, Or humble hamlet peeps their glades among But lives and murmurs in immortal song.