Then might you hear them rend and tear
      The air with their outcries;
  The hideous noise of their sad voice
      Ascendant to the skies. 
  They wring their hands, their caitiff hands,
      And gnash their teeth for terror;
  They cry, they roar, for anguish sore,
      And gnaw their tongue for horror. 
  But get away without delay;
      Christ pities not your cry;
  Depart to hell, there may you yell
      And roar eternally.

The Revolutionary epoch gave birth to sundry epic ballads—­such as Francis Hopkinson’s Battle of the Kegs and Major Andre’s Cow Chase—­and “to three epics, each of them almost as long as the Iliad, which no one now reads, and in which one vainly seeks a touch of nature or a bit of genuine poetry.”  This enormous mass of verse includes Trumbull’s burlesque epic, McFingal (1782), a work so popular in its day that collectors possess samples of no less than thirty pirated editions.  Although favorably compared to Butler’s Hudibras, and “one of the Revolutionary forces,” this poem—­a satire on the Tories—­has left few traces in our language, aside from the familiar quotation: 

  A thief ne’er felt the halter draw
  With good opinion of the law.

The second epic of this period is Timothy Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan” in eleven books, and the third Barlow’s “Columbiad.”  The latter interminable work was based on the poet’s pompous Vision of Columbus, which roused great admiration when it appear (1807).  While professing to relate the memorable voyage of Columbus in a grandly heroic strain, the Columbiad introduces all manner of mythical and fantastic personages and events.  In spite of its writer’s learning and imagination, this voluminous epic fell quite flat when published, and there are now very few persons who have accomplished the feat of reading it all the way through.  Still, it contains passages not without merit, as the following lines prove: 

  Long on the deep the mists of morning lay,
  Then rose, revealing, as they rolled away,
  Half-circling hills, whose everlasting woods
  Sweep with their sable skirts the shadowy floods: 
  And say, when all, to holy transport given,
  Embraced and wept as at the gates of Heaven,
  When one and all of us, repentant, ran,
  And, on our faces, blessed the wondrous man: 
  Say, was I then deceived, or from the skies
  Burst on my ear seraphic harmonies? 
  “Glory to God!” unnumbered voices sung: 
  “Glory to God!” the vales and mountains rang. 
  Voices that hailed Creation’s primal morn,
  And to the shepherds sung a Saviour born. 
  Slowly, bare-headed, through the surf we bore
  The sacred cross, and, kneeling, kissed the shore. 
  ’But what a scene was there?  Nymphs of romance,
  Youths graceful as the Fawn, with eager glance,
  Spring from the glades, and down the alleys peep,
  Then headlong rush, bounding from steep to steep,
  And clap their hands, exclaiming as they run,
  “Come and behold the Children of the Sun!”