Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[40] in form. So is most of the prose and verse in any age. The fact remains to be insisted upon that if his essays and his verse are Addisonian and Butlerian, they have the unmistakable quality of literature. His Ode to sleep, written at about the close of his New Haven residence, owns a greater master than Pope or Butler:--

Descend, and graceful in thy hand,
With thee bring thy magic wand,
And thy pencil, taught to glow
In all the hues of Iris' bow.
And call thy bright, aerial train,
Each fairy form and visionary shade,

That in th' Elysian land of dreams,
The flower-inwoven banks along,
Or bowery maze that shades the purple streams,
Where gales of fragrance breathe th' enamor'd song,
In more than mortal charms array'd,

People the airy vales and revel in thy reign.

This was written at twenty-three, an age which may be expected to produce imitative work. In the mean time, during 1772 and 1773, Trumbull gave unmistakable evidence of his power as a satirist, by producing The power of Dullness, a long poem in three parts, published separately, and ridiculing