"I Have Not The
Heart To Shoot At The King-Birds; Nor Do I Enter Very Actively Into
The Battle Of The Bees.
...
I give them fair play, good lodging,
limitless flowers, willows bending (as Virgil advises) into the
quiet water of a near pool; I have even read up the stories of a
poor blind Huber, who so dearly loved the bees, and the poem of
Giovanni Rucellai, for their benefit." Can the reader state, without
stopping to consider, which author it was that wrote thus - Mitchell
or Crevecoeur? Certainly it is the essential modernity of the
earlier writer's style that most impresses one, after the charm of
his pictures. His was the age of William Livingston - later Governor
of the State of New Jersey; and in the very year when a London
publisher was bringing out the first edition of the Farmer's
Letters, Livingston, described on his title-page as a "young
gentleman educated at Yale College," brought out his Philosophic
Solitude at Trenton, in his native state. It is worth quoting
Philosophic Solitude for the sake of the comparison to be drawn
between Crevecoeur's prose and contemporary American verse:-
"Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms,
Pant after fame, and rush to war's alarms ...
Mine be the pleasures of a RURAL life."
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:
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