The glorious close of the war of Independence gave to America a poetic theme that seemed to the new generation the greatest that had ever filled the pens of poets, the future glories of the new republic. Upon none of them was this idea more tremendously impressed than upon Joel Barlow, who even in his college days at Yale-he was graduated class poet in 1778-had begun upon that colossal poem that was to widen into the Vision of Columbus, and finally, after many years, into the ocean-like Columbiad. In his early period he showed real poetic promise. He was chosen to make a version of the Psalms for use as a hymn book, and his version stands high in poetic quality. Again, while in France, he wrote another poem of real excellence, his Hasty-Pudding, a mock heroic pastoral that in parts suggests the Whittier of a later generation. Of his ponderous epic The Vision of Columbus, later absorbed in his Columbiad with its ten books, less can be said. The theme is not unpoetic. Hesper takes Columbus into a high mountain and shows him Columbia, and unfolds to him the history to be. But size, or even glorious subject, cannot alone make a great epic. The poem is turgid in style, often bombastic, and always heavy. In one respect however it ranks as the greatest poem in American literature. The first edition of it, in huge quarto, was a magnificent volume, and according to Barrett Wendell it was in size "among the most impressive books to look at in the world." It helped its author to various important diplomatic positions abroad undoubtedly, but little more can be said of it. An attempt to give the land of Niagara and the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains and the great plains an epic of equal magnitude, is an attempt that is sure to result not only in failure but even in ridicule.