fourth year of the present century; a translation from the German was made by the gray-haired veteran who had passed, by seven summers, the allotted period of man’s life; while Mr. Halleck’s latest original poem—“Young America”—was written near the close of the year 1863, beneath the shadows of the same grand old Guilford elms under which the poet was born and buried.
“The Croakers,” that now appear for the first time with Halleck’s poetical writings, are the joint production of the attached friends Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. The origin of these sprightly jeux d’esprit, as eagerly looked for each evening as were the war-bulletins of a later day, may not be without interest to the authors’ troops of admirers. Halleck and Drake were spending a Sunday morning with Dr. William Langstaff, an eccentric apothecary and an accomplished mineralogist, with whom they were both intimate (the two last mentioned were previously fellow-students in the study of medicine with Drs. Bruce and Romayne), when Drake, for his own and his friends’
