d great eminence in the several
professions and in the conduct of important national affairs. As an
instance of his patriotic attachment to his adopted country, upon
casually meeting, late in life, a certain writer of the town, after a
cordial salutation, he added with a slight dash of the brogue, "I thank
ye for the Red and the Blue!" The young person was a little taken aback,
not remembering the allusion, for a moment, when the old gentleman
repeated emphatically,--"The Red and the Blue, ye know--Tom Campbell." It
was in reference to a couple of stanzas, addressed to the United States
by that great lyric poet, scarcely equaled in his day, namely:--

"United States! your banner wears
Two emblems: one of fame;
Alas! the other that it bears
Reminds us of your shame!

"The white man's liberty in types
Stands blazoned by your stars:
But what's the meaning of your stripes?
They mean your negroes' scars."

To this the American had retorted:--

"TO THE ENGLISH FLAG.

"England! whence came each glowing hue,
That tints yon flag of 'meteor' light,[4]--
The streaming red, the deeper blue,
Crossed with the moonbeam's pearly white?

"The blood and bruise,--the _blue_ and _red_,--
Let Asia's groaning millions speak!
The _white_,--it tells the color fled
From starving Erin's pallid cheek!"

The verses were at first circulated as above set down. Campbell
afterwards altered the two first lines of the second stanza into:--

"Your standard's constellation types
White freedom by its stars," etc.,--

impairing it, as some will think, both in force and in whatever poetical
expression it may have originally had. Poets are apt to make similar
mistakes, frittering away the first glow of thought and language, in
revision. Has not Tennyson thus injured "The ride of the six hundred?"
and did not Campbell himself half spoil "Hohenlinden," by taming its
phraseology down into a supposed superfluous accuracy? For example, he
first wrote,--

"'Tis morn, but scarce yon lurid sun
Can pierce the war-clouds, rolling dun," etc.

It occurred to him, or some "stop-watch critic" suggested, that the sun
itself was not actually "luri