Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, were a number of authors who resided in the city of New York, and who are known as the Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they were contributors to the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. One of these was James K. Paulding, a connection of Irving by marriage, and his partner in the _Salmagundi_ papers. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and lived down to the year 1860. He was a voluminous author, but his writings had no power of continuance, and are already obsolete, with the possible exception of his novel, the _Dutchman's Fireside_, 1831.
A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, a young poet of great promise, who died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's patriotic lyric, the _American Flag_, is certainly the most spirited thing of the kind in our poetic literature, and greatly superior to such national anthems as _Hail Columbia_ and the _Star-Spangled Banner_. His _Culprit Fay_, published in 1819, was the best poem that had yet appeared in America, if we except Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, which was three years the elder. The _Culprit Fay_ was a fairy story, in which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to throw the glamour of poetry about the Highlands of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem was fanciful rather than imaginative; but it is prettily and even brilliantly fanciful, and has maintained its popularity to the present time. Such verse as the following--which seems to show that Drake had been reading Coleridge's _Christabel_, published three years before--was something new in American poetry:
"The winds are whist and the owl is still, The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, And naught is heard on the lonely hill But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill Of the gauze-winged katydid, And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings Ever a note of wail and woe, Till morning spreads her rosy wings, And earth and sky in her glances glow."
Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American bird, and not the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of which is universally known;