Near the road leading from West Farms to Hunt's Point, on the sound and on the edge of the marshes which border the Bronx River, stands an ancient burial place in which repose the remains of Joseph Rodman Drake, the poet who charmed the senses of thousands with the music of "The Culprit Fay," and strung the patriotic feelings of Americans to the highest tension when his muse sung of the national glory. Dying at the age of twenty-five, his

LITERATURE AND LITERARY MEN.

was a life of promise cut short long before the maturity of his gifts could be reached. All readers knowthat he forever celebrated the rural beauties of the Bronx in some of his daintiest verse, and it was proper that he should be laid to rest near its banks. But whatever fitness there might have been in the selection of his burial place is lost in the neglect into which it was afterward permitted to fall. One who visited it in 1865 * gave a most depressing description of its forsaken and desolate appearance. The entire iuclosure was covered with briers, weeds and rank grass, which grew thickly around the i)<)et's monument. This was a neat marble shaft, eight feet high, bearing the inscription, --

" Sncrcd to the iiicmory of

Juseph K. Drake, M.D.,

who died Scjit. 21st, 1820.

Aged 25 years. Xone knew him but to love him, Xor named him but to praise."'

The salt marsh surrounded the knoll on which the cemetery is laid out and the Bronx at that point is but a lazily flowing stream. At the rate of decay then in progress the people of a few generations later would be compelled to refer to books and maps to know where the grave of Drake was situated.