Mann bearing the Town Resolves of Marshfield to Boston. The sale did not
repay the outlay. When Trumbull died, in 1831, he was as completely
forgotten as any Revolutionary colonel or captain.

Humphreys once feeling, that, in spite of all his struggles, he was not
doing much, exclaimed,--

"Why, niggard language, dost thou balk my soul?"

He did not see the reason why: his soul had not much to say. This was
the trouble with them all. There was not a spark of genuine poetic fire
in the Seven. They sang without an ear for music; they strewed their
pages with faded artificial flowers which they mistook for Nature, and
endeavored to overcome sterility of imagination and want of passion by
veneering with magniloquent epithets. They padded their ill-favored
Muse, belaced and beruffled her, and covered her with garments
stiffened with tawdry embroidery to hide her leanness; they overpowdered
and overrouged to give her the beauty Providence had refused. I say
their Muse, but they had no Muse of their own; they imported an inferior
one from England, and tried her in every style,--Pope's and Dryden's,
Goldsmith's and Gray's, and never rose above a poor imitation; producing
something which looked like a model, but lacked its flavor: wooden
poetry, in short,--a genuine product of the soil.

Judging from their allusions to themselves, no one of the Seven
mistrusted his own poetical powers or the gifts of his colleagues. They
seem to have died in their error, unrepentant, in the comfortable hope
of an hereafter of fame. Their works have faded out of sight like an
unfinished photograph. It was a sad waste of human endeavor, a
profitless employment of labor, unusual in Connecticut.[C]

But, although thus "wrecked upon the rock of rhyme," these bards of
Connecticut were not mere waste-paper of mankind, as Franklin sneeringly
called our poets, but sensible, well-educated gentlemen of good English
stock, of the best social position, and industrious in their business;
for Alsop was the only one who "left no calling for the idle trade."
Hopkins stood at the head of his profession. Dwight was beloved and
respected as minister, legislator, theologian, and President of Yale
College. Trumbull was a member of the State Legislature, State's
Attorney, and Judge of the Supreme Court. Humphreys served on
Washington's staff, received a sword from Congress for his gallantry at
Yorktown, was Secretary of Legation at Paris, Minister to Portugal