Excerpt from The Culprit Fay Drake's marvelously delicate and beautiful poem The Culprit Fay is valuable not only for historical reasons, as a landmark in American literature, but also for its own sake, as a composition which possesses a charm alike for young and old and which is to-day as fresh in its interest as on the day when it was first published. Historically The Culprit Fay appears as the first narrative poem of any importance in American letters. With Scott's narrative poems and Moore's Lallah Rookh, it marks the transition from the fixed pentar meters of the old heroic verse to the lighter, shorter lines of the more modern poetry. It completely refuted the contention, so earnestly put forth, that American scenery could not inspire poetic thought, as does the natural scenery of the Old World. It lent a charm to the scenes of the Hudson, akin to that which is possessed by the storied and ruin-crowned banks of the rivers of Europe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.