His poetical career reached its climax in 1794 in a clerical Connecticut pastoral in seven books, called "Greenfield Hill." Perhaps his verses were not above the level of the Beatties and Youngs he imitated; but at least they earned for President Dwight no mean reputation in days when poetry was at its lowest ebb, and made him the father of a school.
One quality gave respectability to his writing apart from genius. He loved and believed in his country. Perhaps the uttermost depths of his nature were stirred only by affection for the Connecticut Valley; but after all where was human nature more respectable than in that peaceful region? What had the United States then to show in scenery and landscape more beautiful or more winning than that country of meadow and mountain? Patriotism was no ardent feeling among the literary men of the time, whose general sentiment was rather expressed by Cliffton's lines:—
- "In these cold shades, beneath these shifting skies,
- Where Fancy sickens, and where Genius dies,
- Where few and feeble are the Muse's strains,
- And no fine frenzy riots in the veins,
- There still are found a few to whom belong
- The fire of virtue and the soul of song."
William Cliffton, a Pennsylvania Friend, who died in 1799 of consumption, in his twenty-seventh year, knew nothing of the cold shades and shifting skies which chilled the genius of European poets; he knew
