ry few persons who have accomplished the feat of
reading it all the way through. Still, it contains passages not
without merit, as the following lines prove:

Long on the deep the mists of morning lay,
Then rose, revealing, as they rolled away,
Half-circling hills, whose everlasting woods
Sweep with their sable skirts the shadowy floods:
And say, when all, to holy transport given,
Embraced and wept as at the gates of Heaven,
When one and all of us, repentant, ran,
And, on our faces, blessed the wondrous man:
Say, was I then deceived, or from the skies
Burst on my ear seraphic harmonies?
"Glory to God!" unnumbered voices sung:
"Glory to God!" the vales and mountains rang.
Voices that hailed Creation's primal morn,
And to the shepherds sung a Saviour born.
Slowly, bare-headed, through the surf we bore
The sacred cross, and, kneeling, kissed the shore.
'But what a scene was there? Nymphs of romance,
Youths graceful as the Fawn, with eager glance,
Spring from the glades, and down the alleys peep,
Then headlong rush, bounding from steep to steep,
And clap their hands, exclaiming as they run,
"Come and behold the Children of the Sun!"

Not content with an epic apiece, Barlow and Trumbull, with several
other "Hartford wits," joined forces in composing the Anarchiad, which
exercised considerable influence on the politics of its time.

In 1819 appeared Washington Irving's Sketch-Book, which contains the
two classics, Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, and Rip Van Winkle, which
are sometimes quoted as inimitable samples of local epics in prose.
Cooper's Leather-stocking series of novels, including the Deerslayer,
The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The
Prairie, are also often designated as "prose epics of the Indian as he
was in Cooper's imagination," while some of his sea-stories, such as
The Pirate, have been dubbed "epics of the sea." Bryant, first-born of
our famous group of nineteenth-century American poets, made use of
many of the Indian myths and legends in his verse. But he rendered his
greatest service to epic poetry by his translations of the Iliad and
the Odyssey, accomplished when already eighty years of age.

There are sundry famous American heroic odes or poems which contain
epic lines, such as Halleck's Marco Bozzaris, Dana's Buccaneers,
Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal, and Biglow Papers, Whittier's Mogg
Megone, Holmes's Grandmother's Story of B