from The Vision of Columbus (1787)
by Joel Barlow
Joel Barlow (1754-1812), the last of the four original Hartford Wits, came to Yale in 1774 at the age of 20 after a stint at Dartmouth. Joel grew up on a farm in Redding, Connecticut, the fourth son of Samuel and Esther Barlow and one of nine total children. His humble upbringing as the son of a farmer led to a close friendship with classmate Noah Webster.
Barlow became a French citizen in the winter of 1791-92, just as the French Revolution, of which he was a supporter, was coming to a head. Even during his European travels, Barlow never forgot his Connecticut heritage. The comical poem, The Hasty-Pudding: A Poem in Three Cantos (1793), written about his experience eating a cornmeal dish in a French inn that reminded him of the hasty pudding he grew up with, is perhaps the work that Barlow is best remembered for. In 1804, back in the United States, Barlow picked his The Vision of Columbus back up and expanded it to become The Columbiad: A Vision of Internal Peace (1807), which he hoped might restore American faith in democracy. Barlow served as a diplomat for the United States in Algiers and France before his death in 1812 in Warsaw, Poland.
It is believed that Joel Barlow was inspired to begin this epic poem while in service to the Continental Army during the American Revolution. The Vision of Columbus provides an overview of America’s glorious past and promising future from the perspective of the explorer Christopher Columbus, who at the time was credited with the “founding” of America. In the poem, an angel visits an imprisoned Columbus to show him the country that he “discovered.” Written shortly after Barlow became a minister, the influence of Christianity is clear, but Barlow also includes many ideas from the Enlightenment, advocating for knowledge, art, and science. Overall, Barlow applauds the “blest period” of time, when the “peaceful race / shall speak one language and one cause embrace,” which is in his mind, the cause of liberty.
The Vision of Columbus. Excerpt: Book IX.
“At this blest period, when thy peaceful race
Shall speak one language and one cause embrace,
Science and arts a speedier course shall find,
And open earlier on the infant mind.
No foreign terms shall crowd with barbarous rules.
The dull, unmeaning pageantry of schools;
Nor dark authorities, nor names unknown
Fill the learn’d head with ign’rance not its own
But truth’s fair eye, with beams unclouded, shine,
And simplest rules her moral lights confine;
One living language, one unborrow’d dress
Her boldest flights with happiest force express;
Triumphant virtue, in the garb of truth,
Win a pure passage to the heart of youth,
Pervade all climes, where suns or oceans roll,
And bid the gospel cheer the illumined whole.
As the glad day-star, on his golden throne,
Fair type of truth and promise of the sun,
Smiles up the orient, in his rosy ray,
Illumes the front of heaven, and leads the day
Thus soaring Science, daughter of the skies,
First o’er the nations bids her beauties rise,
Prepares the glorious way, to pour abroad
The beams of Heaven’s own morn, the splendors of a
Then blessed Religion leads the raptured mind,
Thro’ brighter fields and pleasures more refined
Teaches the roving eye, at one broad view,
To glance o’er time and look Existence thro’,
See worlds, and worlds, to Being’s formless end,
With all their hosts, on one dread Power depend,
Seraphs and suns and systems round him rise,
Live in his life and kindle from his eyes,
His boundless love, his all-pervading soul
Illume, sublime and harmonize the whole
Teaches the pride of man to fix its bound
In one small point of this amazing round
To shrink and rest, where Heaven has fix’d its fate,
A line its space, a moment for its date;
Instructs the heart a nobler joy to taste,
And share its feelings with another’s breast,
Extend its warmed wish for all mankind,
And catch the image of the Maker’s mind
While mutual love commands all strife to cease,
And earth join joyous in the songs of peace.
Public domain. Source: https://archive.org/details/visionofcol00barl/page/252/mode/2up