_The Wild Honeysuckle._--Philip Freneau, born in 1752, was a soldier in the American Revolution. Though never rising quite into the highest class of poets, he is our first genuine singer. "The Indian Burying-ground" and "To a Honey-bee" are only less successful than the graceful lines quoted.
_A Health._--Poe was an enthusiastic admirer of this poem. He pronounced it, in his essay entitled "The Poetic Principle," "full of brilliancy and spirit," and added: "It was the misfortune of Mr. Pinkney to have been born too far south. Had he been a New Englander, it is probable that he would have been ranked as the first of American lyrists by that magnanimous cabal which has so long controlled the destinies of American Letters, in conducting the thing called _The North American Review_." This passage, very characteristic of Poe's criticisms, illustrates both his championship of favorites, and unmerciful scourging of foes.
_Unseen Spirits._--The earnest sincerity, evident in every line of this poem, removes it at once from the company of those gay society verses sparkling with conceits which won for Willis the satiric comment of Lowell in "A Fable for Critics:"
"There is Willis, all natty, and jaunty, and gay, Who says his best things in so foppish a way, With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o'erlaying 'em, That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying 'em; Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose,-- Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose!"
Had Willis written more such lyrics as "Unseen Spirits," his fame could hardly have proved so ephemeral. Poe considered this poem Willis's best, and I see no ground for calling the critic's judgment in question.
_To Helen._--This brief lyric, written in the poet's youth, is not only among the most exquisite from his pen, but it furnishes one of the most famous among current quotations:
"The glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome."
_On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake._--These manly lines have yielded another phrase to the world's memory. Hardly any quotation is more hackneyed than the last two verses of the first stanza. Drake was a young poet, the intimate friend and literary co-laborer of Halleck, who died September, 1820, in his twenty-fifth year.