conclusive that palaeozoic
verse-makers wandered over those hills in bygone ages. Their moss-grown
remains, still visible here and there, are as unmistakable as the
footprints of the huge wading birds in the red sandstone of Middletown
and Chatham. _Ou la poesie va-t'elle se nicher?_ How came the Muses to
settle in Connecticut?

Dr. Samuel Peters, in his trustworthy history of the Colony, gives no
answer to this question; but among the oldest inhabitants of remote
Barkhamstead, for whom it is said General Washington and the worthies of
his date still have a being in the flesh, there lingers a mythological
tradition which may explain this aberration of Connecticut character.
The legend runs thus.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, English readers were
entertained with elaborate allegories, in which the passions, the vices,
and even the habits of mankind were personified. Lighter ethical topics
were served up in letters from Philotryphus, Septimius, or others ending
in _us_, and in communications from Flirtilla, Jack Modish, and Co.
Eastern tales and apologues, meditations on human life, essays on
morality, inquiries as to whether the arts and sciences were serviceable
or prejudicial to the human race, dissertations on the wisdom and virtue
of the Chinese, were all the fashion in literature. The Genius of
authorship, or the Demon, if you prefer it, was so precise, refined,
exquisite in manner, and so transcendentally moral in ethics, that he
had become almost insufferable to his master, Apollo. The God was a
little tired, if the truth were known, with the monotonous chant of
Pope, in spite of his wit. He began to think that something more was
required, to satisfy the soul than polished periods and abstract
didactic morality,--and was not much surprised when he observed that
Prior, after dining with Addison and Co., liked to finish the evening
with a common soldier and his wife, and refresh his mind over a pipe and
a pot of beer. But Pope was dead, and so was Thomson, and Goldsmith not
yet heard from. There was a famine of literary invention in England. Out
of work and wages for himself and his _troupe_, "disgusted at the age
and clime, barren of every glorious theme," Phoebus Apollo determined to
emigrate. Berkeley had reported favorably of the new Western Continent:
it was a land of poetical promise to the Bishop.

"There shall be sung another golden age,
The rise of empire and of arts;
The