e of
his house at Mount Vernon, where he produced, in 1785, the best known
of his writings, _Mount Vernon_, an ode of a rather mild description,
which once had admirers. Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in
contemporary letters. After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to
France, where he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in
speculations, and became imbued with French principles, writing a song
in praise of the Guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old
friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America, and built a fine
residence near Washington, which he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary
fame, in his own generation, rested upon his prodigious epic, the
_Columbiad_. The first form of this was the _Vision of Columbus_,
published at Hartford in 1787. This he afterward recast and enlarged
into the _Columbiad_, issued in Philadelphia in 1807, and dedicated to
Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. This was by far the most
sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been published in America,
and was embellished with plates executed by the best London engravers.

The _Columbiad_ was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of
much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being
dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery {385} and
thunder and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in
the last fifty years had read more than a hundred lines of it." In its
ambitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the spirit of the
age which was patriotically determined to create, by _tour de force_, a
national literature of a size commensurate with the scale of American
nature and the destinies of the republic. As America was bigger than
Argos and Troy, we ought to have a bigger epic than the _Iliad_.
Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a
"hill of vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the
history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call it,
Columbia. He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and
fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru; the settlements of the
English Colonies in North America; the old French and Indian Wars; the
Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the
new-born nation. The machinery of the _Vision_ was borrowed from the
11th and 12th books of _Paradise Lost_. Barlow's verse was the
ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his poetic style was