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A HARVARD man, not exempt from the complacency sometimes attributed to graduates of his university, once observed, according to Barrett Wendell, that the group of forgotten litterateurs, who toward the close of the eighteenth century attained a brief measure of fame as the "Hartford Wits," represents the only considerable literary efflorescence of Yale. The remark did not fail to provoke the rejoinder, doubtless from a Yale source, that nevertheless at the time when the Hartford Wits flourished no Harvard man had produced literature half so good as theirs.

How good this literature was considered in its day is not readily understood by the modern reader, for from the Hudibrastic imitations and heroic couplets of these writers, whose brilliance was dimmed so long ago, the contemporary flavor has long since evaporated. Indeed there is no modern reader in the general sense. It is only the antiquarian, the literary researcher, the casual burrower among the shelves of some old library who now opens these yellow pages and follows for a few moments the stilted lines that seem to him a diluted imitation of Pope, Goldsmith and Butler. Professor Beers of Yale ventures the surmise that he may be the only living man who has read the whole of Joel Barlow's "Columbiad."

Yet in their time this coterie of poets, who gathered in the little Connecticut town after the close of the war for independence, became famous not only in their own land but abroad, and the community where most of them lived and met at their "friendly club"—was it at the Black Horse Tavern or the "Bunch of Grapes"?—shone in reflected glory as the literary center of America. No Boswell was among them to record the sparkling epigrams, the jovial give and take, the profound "political and philosophical" debates of those weekly gatherings. Yet imagination loves to linger on the old friendships, the patriotic aspirations, the common passion for creative art, the wooing of the Muses of an older world, thus dimly shadowed forth against the background of the raw young country just embarking on its mysterious experiment.

Do not doubt that these personages whose individualities are now so effectually concealed behind the veil of their sounding and artificial cantos were real young men who cherished their dreams and their hopes. One can see them gathered around the great wood fire in the low ceiled room redolent of tobacco, blazing hickory and hot Jamaica rum.

Here is Trumbull, the lawyer, the author of "M'Fingal" which everybody has read and which has been published in England and honored with the criticism of the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews. He is a little man, rather frail, rather nervous, not without impatience, with a ready wit that sometimes bites deep. Here is Lemuel Hopkins, the physician, whose lank body, long nose and prominent eyes are outward manifestations of his eccentric genius. His presence lends a fillip to the gathering for he is an odd fish and no one can tell what he will do or say next. Threatened all his life with tuberculosis he is nevertheless a man of great muscular strength and during his days as a soldier he used to astonish his comrades by his ability to fire a heavy king's arm, held in one hand at arm's length. In his verses he castigates shams and humbugs of all kinds, whether the nostrums of medical quacks or the irreverent vaporings of General Ethan Allen—

"Lo, Allen, 'scaped from British jails

His tushes broke by biting nails,

Appears in hyperborean skies,

To tell the world the Bible lies."

Perhaps Colonel David Humphreys, full of war stories and anecdotes of his intimacy with General Washington, on whose staff he served, is in Hartford for the evening. A well dressed, hearty, sophisticated traveler and man of the world is Colonel Humphreys, who would be recognized at first glance as a soldier, though not as a poet. Nevertheless he is addicted to the writing of verse which is apt to run in the vein of comedy or burlesque when it is not earnestly patriotic. To look at him one would know that he enjoys a good dinner, a good story and a bottle of port.

We may be sure that Joel Barlow is here, the vacillating, visionary Barlow who has tried, or is to try his hand at many pursuits besides epic poetry—the ministry, the law, bookselling, philosophy, journalism and diplomacy—but who is pre-occupied now, as all his life, with his magnum opus, "The Vision of Columbus," later elaborated into "The Columbiad." He is a good looking, if somewhat self-centered young man, a favorite in the days of his New Haven residence with the young ladies of that town. Perhaps it was there that he first met the charming and talented Elizabeth Whitman, the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Elnathan Whitman, sometime pastor of the South Congregational Church in Hartford, who often visited her friend Betty Stiles, the daughter of the president of Yale College. A few of Elizabeth Whitman's letters that have survived—the packet bearing an endorsement in Barlow's handwriting—are evidence that he made her a confidante of his literary schemes and hopes and welcomed her assistance with his great epic. A strong friendship and entire harmony seem to have existed between her and Ruth Baldwin of New Haven, whom Barlow married during the war, and who is said to have "inspired in the poet's breast a remarkable passion, one that survived all the mutations of a most adventurous career, and glowed as fervently at fifty as at twenty-five." For nearly a year the marriage was kept a secret, but parental forgiveness was at last secured and Barlow has now brought his wife to Hartford where he is continuing his legal studies, begun in his college town. But the law will not engross him long. Soon, with his friend Elisha Babcock, he is to start a new journal, "The American Mercury," of which his editorship, like all of Barlow's early enterprises, is to be brief, though the paper is to continue till 1830.

A tall, slender man, Noah Webster by name, a class-mate of Barlow at Yale, though four years his junior, sits near him, relaxing for the moment in the informality of these surroundings his strangely intense powers of mental application, divided just now between the law and the preparation of his "Grammatical Institute." To the "poetical effusions" of his friends he contributes nothing, but he was an intimate of them all and no doubt often attended their gatherings.

Perhaps, now and later, something of the poet's license in the matter of chronology may be granted. Let us assume, then, that young Dr. Mason Cogswell is in town for a day or two, looking over the ground with a view of settling here in the practice of medicine and surgery in which he is now engaged at Stamford, after his training in New York where he served with his brother James at the soldiers' hospital. It is true that the fragments of his diary, which by a fortunate chance were rescued from destruction, do not mention any visit to Hartford as early as this, though his journal does describe a short sojourn here a few years later. Still, his presence is by no means impossible. He is a companionable youth, as popular with the young ladies as Barlow, but with an easier manner, a readier humor. Delighted at this opportunity to sit for an evening at the feet of the older celebrities, he is a welcome guest, for already he has a reputation for versatility and culture and the fact that he was valedictorian of the Yale Class of 1780—and its youngest member—is not forgotten.

Richard Alsop, book-worm, naturalist and linguist, who is beginning to dip into verse, has locked up his book shop for the night and is here. Near him sits a man who is, or is soon to be, his brother-in-law, a tall, dark youth, Theodore Dwight, the brother of the more famous Timothy, whose pastoral duties detain him at Greenfield Hill, but who is sometimes numbered as one of this group. Theodore is now studying law, but he has a flair for writing and makes an occasional adventure into the gazettes.

These more youthful aspirants have their spurs to win. A little later they, with their friend Dr. Elihu Smith, who published the first American poetic anthology, are to get into print in a vein of satirical verse ridiculing the prevalent literary affectation and bombast. After journalistic publication these satires will appear in book form under the title of "The Echo," in the introduction to which the anonymous authors state that the poems "owed their origin to the accidental suggestion of a moment of literary sportiveness." "The Echo" was "Printed at the Porcupine Press by Pasquin Petronius."

That particular sportive moment is still in the future. Now it is sufficient for these younger men to shine in the reflected luster of the established luminaries. These greater lights are worthy indeed of the worship of the lesser stars. Three of them have achieved, or are soon to acquire, an international as well as a national reputation. That "M'Fingal" had provoked discussion in England has been noted. Humphreys's "Address to the Armies of America," written in camp at Peekskill, and dedicated to the Duke de Rochefoucault, was issued with an introductory letter by the poet's friend, the Marquis de Chastellux, in a French translation in Paris, after its publication in England where the Monthly and Critical Reviews gave it a fair amount of praise, though they could not refrain from the statement that the poem was "not a very pleasing one to a good Englishman." Barlow's "Vision of Columbus" was published almost simultaneously in Hartford and London in 1787.

In short these men had attained a genuine intellectual eminence in their generation. They were the cognoscenti of their day. Like most young intellectuals their gospel concerned itself with reform, with the ridicule of shams, with the refusal to accept the popularity of new doctrines as a final test of their value. Trumbull and Barlow, both Yale graduates, had fought with their friend Timothy Dwight their first reform campaign which was an effort to introduce into the somewhat archaic and outworn body of the Yale curriculum the breath of the humanities and of modern thought. Trumbull, according to Moses Coit Tyler, was an example of a "new tone coming into American letters—urbanity, perspective, moderation of emphasis, satire, especially on its more playful side—that of irony."

Their interests were not only literary. They were publicists, political satirists, social philosophers, not without their religious theories. In all these matters their search was for the true standards and as champions of causes and enthusiasts of ideals they exhibited a variation from type in that their warfare was waged, not against the recognized conventions in government, religion and society, but in favor of them. Priding themselves on untrammelled and direct thinking, their reasoning led them to support the established, the orderly, the stable. Temperamentally aristocrats, theoretically republicans—in the broad sense of the term—they were practically federalists. "The Anarchiad," a series of poems they were contributing anonymously about this time to "The New Haven Gazette," dealt satirically with the dangers of national unrest and instability, of selfish aggrandizement and of a fictitious currency. In these verses Hesper addresses "the Sages and Counsellors at Philadelphia" as follows:

"But know, ye favor'd race, one potent head

Must rule your States, and strike your foes with dread."

And in the same passage occur some lines, attributed to Hopkins, that Daniel Webster may have read:

"Through ruined realms the voice of UNION calls;

On you she calls! Attend the warning cry:

YE LIVE UNITED, OR DIVIDED, DIE!"

They ridiculed unsparingly the dangers hidden under the cloak of "Democracy"—dangers imminent and menacing in the days following the end of the war in which most of them had served. In fighting these perils they were sagacious in making use of the means frequently employed by advocates of radicalism—invective, irony and ridicule. For these methods secured, as they naturally would secure if cleverly managed, a wide appeal. Yet the efficiency of such weapons depends very largely upon the occasion. Their potency is contemporary with the events against which they are directed and with the passing years their force weakens. Who reads nowadays the political diatribes of Swift, the tracts of Defoe, or the letters of Junius? Here perhaps is in part an explanation of the great temporary influence of the Hartford Wits, as well as of their complete modern obscuration. The brilliant blade they wielded had a biting edge, but the rust of a century and a half has dulled it.

This general leaning toward the established canons, this impatience with the new doctrines that in the judgment of these men made for disunion and disaster, should be qualified, at least in the religious aspect, in two interesting particulars, each contradictory to the other. Hopkins began adult life as a sceptic but became a defender of the Christian philosophy. Barlow, on the other hand, deserted in later life the orthodox ideals of his youth, never, perhaps, very enthusiastically championed, and during his sojourn in France became a rationalist and free-thinker.

In general, however, the Hartford Wits fought for the established order against the forces of innovation and disintegration and thus when they sat down to unburden their minds of their visions of their country's future greatness, or of their impatience with demagoguery and political short-sightedness, it was natural that their sense of tradition and order should lead their thoughts to seek expression in the verse forms lifted into fame by the masters of an older and greater literature and accepted as the conventional vehicle of poetic expression. Here is another reason, if they must be catalogued, for the forgetfulness of the Hartford Wits. These balanced, formal lines, so expressive of the artificial modes and manners of the subjects of Queen Anne and her successors, are to us prosy, old-fashioned and imitative. Their charm has fled. Can you imagine Miss Amy Lowell reading Hudibras? And we must admit that "M'Fingal," though it has given to literature some still remembered aphorisms, such as—

"No man e'er felt the halter draw

With good opinion of the law"—

is, on the whole, poorer reading than its model.

ii

It is significant that the distinction of the individuals united in the "friendly club" was not confined to their literary activities. In an age sometimes esteemed narrow and limited in its cultural aspects they are refreshing in their versatility. Trumbull was a well-known lawyer and served on the bench for eighteen years, part of his legal training having been pursued in the office of John Adams. It was a strange combination, not unprecedented but nevertheless arresting, of this talent for the law associated with the artistic temperament. For with all his practical attributes Trumbull was essentially an artist. His early poem entitled "An Ode to Sleep," says Tyler, "is a composition resonant of noble and sweet music and making, if one may say so, a nearer approach to genuine poetry than had then [1773] been achieved by any living American except Freneau." And in the following bit of autobiography, quoted by Tyler, may be discerned the self-distrust and depression to which no soul that longs and strives for the beautiful in this imperfect world is entirely a stranger: "Formed with the keenest sensibility and the most extravagantly romantic feelings . . . . I was born the dupe of imagination. My satirical turn was not native. It was produced by the keen spirit of critical observation, operating on disappointed expectation, and revenging itself on real or fancied wrongs."

This is an extraordinary item of self-revelation to come from a man who at various times held office as State's Attorney for Hartford County, member of the General Assembly and Judge of the Superior and Supreme Courts of his State. It may not be an entirely fanciful surmise to attribute a partial cause of the delicate health that followed Trumbull all his long life to the warring elements that strove to unite in his brilliant mentality.

With Dr. Hopkins poetizing was distinctly a by-product. His chief concern was the practice of medicine and in his profession he won a reputation that is not entirely forgotten today by members of the faculty, for he was probably the first American physician to assert that tuberculosis was curable and his success as a specialist in this field was so marked that, says Dr. Walter R. Steiner in a monograph upon him, "patients with this disease came to him for treatment from a great distance—one being recorded to have made the trip all the way from New Orleans." In his treatment he was unique in his day in very largely discarding the use of drugs and relying more upon pure air, good diet and moderate exercise when strength permitted. His theory that fresh air was better for colds than the warm air of houses was revolutionary, but so was almost everything he did—or so it seemed to his contemporaries. At one time he evidently considered that New York City might offer a wider field of practice than the Connecticut capital, for in December, 1789, Trumbull wrote to Oliver Wolcott, "Dr. Hopkins has an itch of running away to New York, but I trust his indolence will prevent him. However if you should catch him in your city, I desire you to take him up or secure him so that we may have him again, for which you shall have sixpence reward and all charges." In spite of his malady he lived till almost fifty-one, dying in April, 1801, the head of the medical profession in Connecticut.

It is to be noted that though Dr. Cogswell was one of the chief contributors to "The Echo" his main business in life was as a surgeon rather than a poet, and he became one of the most skillful surgical practitioners in the country, being the first to introduce into the United States the operation for cataracts and the first to tie the carotid artery. Closely associated with him is the pathetic memory of his daughter Alice who became stone deaf in early childhood and whose infirmity led to the establishment at Hartford of the first school in this country for the education of the deaf. Of this institution Dr. Cogswell was one of the founders and he was a leader in other philanthropic enterprises. He lived till 1830. To the last he wore the knee breeches and silk stockings customary in his youth and which he considered the only proper dress for a gentleman. His death broke the heart of his daughter Alice, to whom he had been a never-failing protection and support, and she died within a fortnight after her father.

In contrast with the activities of their colleagues, the careers of Theodore Dwight and Alsop are associated solely with the product of their pens. Dwight, however, was more of a publicist and editor than a creative literary worker. He had the brains with which nature had endowed his family and his history of the unjustly maligned Hartford Convention is a thoughtful and able piece of work—an original historical document that is illuminating and suggestive. Such distinction as Alsop attained was strictly literary, yet one gets the impression that he worked at writing rather as an amateur than a professional. He was really a student, a scholar, a research worker, and seems to have sought his reward more in the pleasure of following his interests than in the quest of public recognition. Much that he wrote was never published.

There was a great deal in life that Colonel Humphreys enjoyed besides composing verses and a great many activities other than poetry for which he may be remembered. Not the least hint of any paralyzing self-distrust, no subtle questionings as to whether it was all worth while, disturbed his equanimity. And fate rewarded his zest in life by furnishing him with a variety of experiences. They began in the war from which he emerged with a reputation for gallantry and daring and, what was perhaps more valuable, with the firm friendship of George Washington. He participated in the raid into Sag Harbor by Colonel Meigs in '77 and the next year raided the Long Island shore on his own account, burning three enemy ships and getting away without the loss of a man. It was only a freak of the weather that perhaps withheld from him a more glorious exploit for on Christmas night, 1780, he headed a desperate venture that had for its object no less an achievement than the capture of Sir Henry Clinton at his headquarters in New York. The rising of the wintry northwest gale drove the boats of the little group of adventurers away from the intended landing near the foot of Broadway and swept them down through the British shipping in the harbor to Sandy Hook. After Yorktown he was ordered by Washington to carry the captured colors to Congress which in the enthusiasm of the moment voted him a handsome sword.

"See Humphreys, glorious from the field retire.

Sheathe the glad sword and string the sounding lyre,"

wrote Barlow in his "Vision of Columbus," The lyre accompanied songs in praise of his country, tributes to his commander-in-chief, political satires, and even love lyrics—

"Enough with war my lay has sung

A softer theme awakes my tongue

'Tis beauty's force divine;

Can I resist that air, that grace,

The charms of motion, figure, face?

For ev'ry charm is thine."

But this was by the way. Appointed secretary to the commission, consisting of Franklin, John Adams and Jefferson, sent to negotiate treaties of commerce and amity with European nations, he no doubt thoroughly enjoyed his two years in London and Paris. In theory the nobility of Europe may have been anathema to a patriotic citizen of a republic, but practically there were many persons among them whose acquaintance was agreeable to an amiable and gallant gentleman of sensibility like Colonel Humphreys and there was, no doubt, a certain gratification in dedicating one's poems to a duke and in having them reviewed by a marquis who incidentally disclosed the fact that he was an old companion in arms. Also it was pleasant to be elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

On Colonel Humphreys's return he spent some time as a member of the family at Mount Vernon where Washington encouraged him in his project of writing a history of the war which, however, never got any further in print than a memorial of his old general, Putnam. At Mount Vernon he wrote an ode celebrating his great and good friend whose friendship we may reasonably infer constituted one of his chief conversational assets:

"Let others sing his deeds in arms,

A nation sav'd, and conquest's charms:

Posterity shall hear,

'Twas mine, return'd from Europe's courts

To share his thoughts, partake his sports

And sooth his partial ear."

It is clear that European life had its attractions for Colonel Humphreys. At all events he returned to it, serving as minister to Portugal and later to Spain whence he imported his famous merino sheep to his acres at Humphreysville, now Seymour. Here, and in the adjoining town of Derby, he projected and to a creditable extent realized, an ideal patriarchal manufacturing and farming community, instructing his operatives and husbandmen in improved industrial methods, in scientific agriculture and stock raising, athletics, poetry and the drama in which one of his productions was actually presented on the stage. At least he accomplished his wish, voiced in his poem "On the Industry of the United States of America"—

"Oh, might my guidance from the downs of Spain

Lead a white flock across the western main,

. . . . .

Clad in the raiment my merinos yield,

Like Cincinnatus, fed from my own field:

. . . . .

There would I pass, with friends, beneath my trees,

What rests from public life, in letter'd ease."

iii

Though the friends grouped around the tavern fire are united in two sympathetic qualities—devotion to the Muses and a proud conviction, singularly justified by events, of the destiny of their country—it is manifest that the membership of the little club furnishes only another illustration of the truism that human personality is the most varying thing in the world and that life has different lessons for each of us. The most baffling individuality of them all, the man whose story seems to have been a quest for some mysterious, unattained goal, was Joel Barlow.

In early life everything he attempted went to pieces. His chaplaincy in the army was a tour de force which he dropped as soon as possible. The law proved a mistake almost as soon as begun and his editorship of "The American Mercury" was abandoned after less than a year. Perhaps it was with renewed hope, perhaps it was with something of desperation, that he persuaded himself to embark on an entirely new undertaking and to accept a proposal to journey overseas to procure settlers for the Ohio lands which the Scioto Land Company desired to sell to unsuspecting Frenchmen. It is an established fact that Barlow was unsuspecting himself, but after he had procured the settlers and shipped them off with golden promises the project turned out to be a gigantic fraud. Personal humiliation was added to general discouragement. Yet somehow he survived the mortification. It may be that at this particular time mundane affairs did not seem to be of the utmost importance. He was dwelling somewhat in the clouds, in a vision—the "Vision of Columbus," which he proposed to amplify and republish in a form more fitting the great theme than the first modest edition of the original poem. He was pre-occupied with the millenium he foresaw.

To the present day reader it is of the highest interest to note that the "Vision" foretold the Panama Canal, and that the climax of the poem is a congress of the nations.

"Hither the delegated sires ascend,

And all the cares of every clime attend.

. . . . . .

To give each realm its limits and its laws

Bid the last breath of dire contention cease,

And bind all regions in the leagues of peace."

Indeed with the break-down of his career as a promoter the tide began to turn. Barlow's friends knew he was innocent of complicity in the land swindle. In Paris he found himself at last in an environment where freedom of thought was encouraged, where the ambitions of a poet were regarded with respect and admiration. He was always an idealist and he caught the contagion in the mental atmosphere of Paris as the revolution came on. Perhaps it seemed to him that his dream of the millenium was coming true. He became a Girondist and a political writer, supporting himself mainly by his pen, with the re-writing of the "Vision" always in the back of his mind. Was this the real Barlow—or was it a phase, a manifestation of a kind of philosophic idealism, fostered by the air of Paris, so favorable to the blossoming of this new flower of liberty and universal human brotherhood which centered on France the minds of all the dreamers of the world?

What did he now think, we wonder, of his dedication of the first edition of his epic, published the year before he sailed for France, to Louis the Sixteenth whom, as one commentator has noted, he soon indirectly assisted in sending to the guillotine? He had gone a long way from the militant conservatism of the brilliant companions of his youth—from the days when he had preached the gospel to American soldiers and had collaborated with Timothy Dwight, at the request of the General Association of the Connecticut Clergy, in getting out an edition of Isaac Watts's metrical versions of the Psalms—to which he had added a few poetical renderings of his own.

For the following years his residence alternated between Paris and London where he found congenial souls among the artists and poets who were members of the Constitutional Society. His "Advice to the Privileged Orders" was attacked by Burke, praised by Fox, proscribed by the British government and translated into French and German. In 1792 he presented to the National Convention of France a treatise on government which was in fact a remarkable state paper, combining profound philosophic theories of government with practical administrative and executive suggestions. As a result he was made a citizen of France—an honor he shared among Americans with only Washington and Hamilton.

Defeat for election as a deputy from Savoy and his repugnance to the excesses of the Revolution appear to have thrown him out of practical politics for a time. And then a strange thing happened. This visionary poet and idealist attempted to retrieve his fortunes in commerce and speculation and actually succeeded. During his consulship at Algiers, from which he anticipated he might never return, he left a letter for his wife in which he stated that his estate might amount to one hundred and twenty thousand dollars if French funds rose to par.

This appointment came to him in a pleasant way. One day in the summer of 1795 he returned from a business trip to the Low Countries to find an old friend waiting for him. Colonel Humphreys, now minister at Lisbon, had arrived at the request of the administration to ask Barlow to accept this mission to Algiers where for a year and a half he was to labor, succeeding in the end in liberating imprisoned countrymen and in effecting a treaty that composed troublesome difficulties.

It must have been an interesting reunion. Humphreys was too much of a cosmopolitan, too generous in spirit, to make Barlow's growing liberalism of thought a personal grievance. Here for the exiled American was first-hand news of the old Connecticut friends—that Trumbull, between ill health and the pressure of public affairs, was neglecting the Muses; that Noah Webster was said to be working on a great lexicon; that Dr. Cogswell had settled in Hartford and married a daughter of Colonel William Ledyard who was killed at Fort Griswold with his own sword in the act of surrender; that a play by Dr. Elihu Smith had been acted at the John Street Theatre in New York; that Timothy Dwight would probably succeed Dr. Stiles as President of Yale—and much besides. Very likely Humphreys confided to his friend his growing interest in Miss Ann Bulkley, an English heiress, whom he had met in Lisbon and who soon afterward was to become his wife, and Barlow no doubt found a sympathetic listener to his great project of enlarging and re-publishing the "Vision."

His return from Algiers found French consols rising with the Napoleonic successes and Barlow lived as became a man of wealth and distinction. Robert Fulton, who made his home with him, painted his portrait in the intervals of experimenting with submarine boats and torpedoes in the Seine and the harbor at Brest. Indeed Barlow had now acquired so strong an influence with the Directory and the French people that his biographer attributes to him the chief part in averting war between France and the United States in the tense days after 1798.

Then followed a return to his own country where he had an ambition to found a national institution for education and the advancement of science. He built a beautiful home, not in New England, be it noted, but near Washington—the "Holland House of America"—and began, but never finished, a history of the United States. He did, however, at last complete "The Columbiad," which was published in Philadelphia in 1807—"the finest specimen of book-making ever produced in America."

Did the great moment hold something of disillusion and disappointment, when, amid the somewhat perfunctory adulation, came the bitter criticism of the Federalists and the expressed conviction of some of his old Yale and Hartford friends that he was an apostate in politics and religion? To him it was clear that they did not understand. How could it be expected that Timothy Dwight, for example, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, with all of New England's conservatism and provincialism in his blood, could understand? Yet Barlow's ancestral background was the same—but who can fathom the depths of personality, or solve the complexity of motive and aspiration?

Perhaps there were times when the returned wanderer grew homesick for Paris. At last the chance to return to the land that had adopted him came—a chance for notable service in an honorable capacity. War was again in the air and in 1811 Barlow went back to France as minister plenipotentiary, charged with the duty of again averting conflict and negotiating a treaty embodying a settlement of the differences.

In the French capital he took his old house. His old servants came back to him with tears of joy. Old friends gathered about him. It was not easy, however, to clinch the treaty. The Emperor was involved in momentous affairs. The Russian expedition was on foot. The ministers procrastinated. There is an intimation in the record that the poet and political theorist was out-maneuvered in the negotiations by players of a game that had nothing to do with poetry or abstract questions but that concerned itself, persistently and relentlessly, with very definite but not entirely obvious purposes. Yet it does not seem that this inference is conclusively supported by the evidence. However that may be, it was given out that Barlow had secured, and he unquestionably believed that he had secured, an agreement as to the provisions of the proposed treaty. At any rate the Emperor consented to meet the American envoy if he would come to Vilna in West Russia.

So in that dreary winter he set out with a high hope of achieving his greatest service to his country, but what would have happened at Vilna we shall never know, for on Barlow's approach to that town an incredible and stupendous piece of news awaited him. The invincible Grand Army was retreating, apparently in some demoralization. Everything was in confusion. Where the Emperor was, no one knew. Obviously nothing could now be done and the American minister started to return.

Somewhere on those frozen roads the Emperor passed him, racing for Paris to save his dynasty and himself. In the exposure and hardship Barlow fell ill. At the little village of Zarnovich, near Cracow, it became evident that he could travel no further and there, in the midst of that historic cataclysm, he died.

It was a strange ending for one of the old Hartford coterie. In the clairvoyance said sometimes to accompany the supreme moment did he realize that if his great epic might not live forever he had at least given form in his day to a dream of which civilization would never let go? Did any intimation come to him that his "Ode to Hasty Pudding," written off-hand at a Savoyard inn, held more real emotion than all the balanced cadences of his monumental work? No doubt his delirious fancies sometimes went back to the old days. Perhaps he saw once more the faces of his old companions of the friendly club, not clouded now with misunderstanding or disapproval. From beyond the frosted panes came intermittently the confused noises of the great retreat, with all their implications of selfish ambition, human suffering and the continual warfare of the world. Was his belief in the final triumph of the fraternity of mankind shaken by that sinister monotone? It is idle to conjecture, but let us hope that he was comforted by a lingering faith, revived in this hour of his extremity from the days of his youth, that he would soon learn as to the truth of his vision and that he would find as well the answers to the other riddles that had puzzled him all his life.