journey toward Mount Parnassus, had already descended, with what feelings is left to conjecture, by the poet's closing lines of his Valedictory to his muse:
Yet, in this world, some laugh, some sing, some cry.'
The Mohawk reviewers, as John Davis called the then critics of our city, thought, with the old saying, that "where there is so much smoke, there must be some fire." But it is no longer questionable, that our Castalian font was often dry, and when otherwise, its stream was rather a muddy rivulet than a spring of living waters. It needs our faithful Lossing to clear up the difficulties of that doubtful period of patriotism and of poetry.
There were enough enlightened minds and generous hearts to recognize the merits of Colles. He stood before the community as a kind of miniature edition of Count Rumford. Projectors, with new inventions, sought his opinions. Garnett, of Now-Jersey, a clever man, and in literary communion with the poet Akenside, conversed with him on the most effective impulse secured by the sails of the windmill. Williamson queried him on the electric powers of the gymnotus; Blanchard, the æronaut, on the æriform currents of our atmosphere; and Mitchill unfolded to him his theory of septic acid and how the Python produced pestilence. When Perkins arrived among us, armed with his tractors, and fortified by the credentials of a score of bishops and other dignitaries of the Church of England, in behalf of their saving efficacy, Colles, who meddled a little with physic, had nearly been entrapped by that infamous impostor, who assumed the ability to cure yellow fever by his metallic points, during its prevalence in 1799. The death of Perkins himself, on the third day of his illness, by the epidemic, while in full use of his remedial agent, was too convincing evidence of the absurdity of his means, for Colles longer to prosecute inquiries into the nature of the tractors and their mesmeric influence. Yet after all this sort of Caleb Quotem occupation, it was demonstrable that Colles, in feelings or in thoughts, never dismounted from the hobby he first rode: water and water-courses,
