The distinguished historian of colonial Africa, Peter Duignan, a colleague of mine here at the Hoover Institution, flummoxed me yesterday. He’d just been reading Keat’s superbly spare poem, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer ,” and had found himself unable to place the allusion in the final line, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” When Peter asked me about the allusion, I suppose it goes without saying, the only Darien that came to my little mind was the bedroom community for financial titans on the Gold Coast of Connecticut.

Rick Brookhiser? John Derbyshire? Are you there?