The thought is, after all, the same as that which we have found less
directly phrased in Crevecoeur. But let us quote the lines that
follow the exordium - now we should find the poet unconstrained and
fancy-free: -
"Me to sequestred scenes, ye muses, guide,
Where nature wantons in her virgin-pride;
To mossy banks edg'd round with op'ning flow'rs,
Elysian fields, and amaranthin bow'rs. ...
Welcome, ye shades! all hail, ye vernal blooms!
Ye bow'ry thickets, and prophetic glooms!
Ye forests hail! ye solitary woods. ..."
and the "solitary woods" (rhyming with "floods") are a good place to
leave the "young gentleman educated at Yale College." Livingston
was, plainly enough, a poet of his time and place. He had a fine eye
for Nature - seen through library windows. He echoed Goldsmith and a
whole line of British poets - echoed them atrociously.
That one finds no "echoes" in Crevecoeur is one of our reasons for
praising his spontaneity and vigour. He did not import nightingales
into his America, as some of the poets did. He blazed away, rather,
toward our present day appreciation of surrounding nature - which was
not banal then. Crevecoeur's honest and unconventionalised love of
his rural environment is great enough to bridge the difference
between the eighteenth and the twentieth century. It is as easy for
us to pass a happy evening with him as it was for Thomas Campbell,
figuring to himself a realisation of Cowley's dreams and of
Rousseau's poetic seclusion; "till at last," in Southey's words,
"comes an ill-looking Indian with a tomahawk, and scalps me - a most
melancholy proof that society is very bad." It is the freshness, the
youthfulness, of these Letters, after their century and more of
dust-gathering, that is least likely to escape us. And this "Farmer
in Pennsylvania" is almost as unmistakably of kin with good Gilbert
White of Selborne as he is the American Thoreau's eighteenth-century
forerunner.
III
It is time, indeed, that we made the discovery that Crevecoeur was a
modern. He was, too, a dweller in the young republic - even before it
WAS a republic. Twice a year he had "the pleasure of catching
pigeons, whose numbers are sometimes so astonishing as to obscure
the sun in their flight." There is, then, no poetic licence about
Longfellow's description, in Evangeline, of how -
"A pestilence fell on the city Presaged by wondrous signs, and
mostly by flocks of wild pigeons, Darkening the sun in their flight,
with naught in their craws but an acorn."
Longfellow could have cited as his authority for this flight of
pigeons Mathew Carey's Record of the Malignant Fever lately
Prevalent, published at Philadelphia, which, to be sure, discusses a
different epidemic, but tells us that "amongst the country people,
large quantities of wild pigeons in the spring are regarded as
certain indications of an unhealthy summer.
