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

---

[68] in this country appeared there in 1809, under the title of The American poetical Mliscellany, original and selected. The editor says of it, in that florid style which still prevailed in prefaces: “The volume of poetry is made valuable by enfolding in its embraces some of the richest and deepest tinted flowers which ever bound the brows of Melancholy, or sparkled under the heavenly gem which drops from Pity's eye. Its pages are also strewed with many a wild and fragrant flower, gathered by Genius and Fancy, as they together strolled amid the wild luxuriance of the fields of nature.” This belonged to the personifying period, when men wrote “Inoculation, Heavenly maid!”

It is worth noticing, however, that the editor's taste is much better than his style, and he shows unquestionably that the best English poetry of that day, as was true of the poetry of Tennyson and Browning at a later day, was earlier appreciated in America than at home. The volume opens with Burns's Scots wha hae wia Wallace bled and closes with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, in its original and more vigorous form;