Cawein and Riley: bridging the gap

By the end of the 19th century, the so-called Fireside Poets were all dead, writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. But, with their deaths, who took their place as the greatest American poets?

Kentucky poet Madison J. Cawein earned the nickname "The Keats of Kentucky" and published over 1,000 poems. But, he looked to another as a leader among poets. To James Whitcomb Riley, he wrote on August 31, 1898:

You are surely making your way among the best readers of poetry; after the death of Holmes,—is borne in upon me more and more with every new book by you—that you are our greatest poet, the worthy successor and equal of our greatest,—Longfellow, Emerson, and Lowell. In all respect and honor to you I take my hat off... you are their equal, against odds, in literary art; and in my estimation surpass them often in truth, imagery and music:—winning, or having won, your way through your own efforts and inherent genius.

Cawein and Riley were part of a period in American poetry growing beyond the old-fashioned traditions of the Fireside Poets. In fact, when both died early in the 20th century, a critic noted in 1916 that they belonged to "the same school," an era of transition, "bridging the gap between the older poets, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and the rest." After their deaths, "that period may be said to have closed; and it was a period that deserves memory and respect."

Cawein once noted proudly "I have met all the poets that are poets at present in the United States." He listed Holmes and Lowell as people he visited at their homes but warned, "It would take too long to enumerate all the writers who have been my guests." From Cawein's poem "Beauty and Art":

The gods are dead; but still for me
  Lives on in wildwood brook and tree
Each myth, each old divinity...

To him, whose mind is fain to dwell
  With loveliness no time can quell,
All things are real, imperishable.

To him — whatever facts may say —
  Who sees the soul beneath the clay,
Is proof of a diviner day.

The very stars and flowers preach
  A gospel old as God, and teach
Philosophy a child may reach;

That cannot die; that shall not cease;
  That lives through idealities
Of Beauty, ev'n as Rome and Greece.

That lifts the soul above the clod,
  And, working out some period
Of art, is part and proof of God.

Holmes: Now here I stand at fifty

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 29, 1809, Oliver Wendell Holmes became a medical doctor and reformer, a poet, a novelist, and one of the most defining members of Boston culture. He was a standard speaker for various events, meetings, anniversaries, and parties for visiting dignitaries in Boston — and, perhaps most importantly, he gave the city its self-centered nickname as the "Hub of the Solar System."

Holmes was known for his humor, his conversation, and his self-confidence. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that he was the main speaker for his own 50th birthday party on August 29, 1859. He presented a poem which well represented his wit, "At a Meeting of Friends." In it, he both reaffirms and denies that he is approaching old age:

I remember — why yes! God bless me! and was it so long ago?
I fear I'm growing forgetful, as old folks do, you know;
It must have been in 'forty — I would say 'thirty-nine—
We talked this matter over, I and a friend of mine.

He and his friend discuss the question of when old age begins. "Up to the age of thirty we spend our years like change" but somewhere after 30 years old, youth suddenly begins to disappear. They agree that the former youth is old the moment he turns 40... until his 40th birthday:

But one fine August morning I found myself awake:
My birthday: — By Jove, I'm forty! Yes, forty, and no mistake!
Why this is the very milestone, I think I used to hold,
That when a fellow had come to, a fellow would then be old!

In his wizened years, of course, he realizes 40 is not so old after all, and pledges old age does not start until 50. But, now on his 50th birthday, Holmes asks his friends if they think he is old:

Now here I stand at fifty, my jury gathered round;
Sprinkled with dust of silver, but not yet silver-crowned,
Ready to meet your verdict, waiting to hear it told;
Guilty of fifty summers; speak! Is the verdict old?

Sprague and Clarke: Phi Beta Kappa

The Phi Beta Kappa Society honors excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. The chapter at Harvard College was founded in 1799 and hosts an annual literary exercise near commencement every year. On August 27, 1829, the annual address was given by Charles Sprague, the "banker-poet of Boston." Harvard also granted Sprague an honorary doctorate (though he never went to college).

Sprague's lengthy poem, Curiosity, pays homage to that unique human drive for knowledge. "It came from Heaven," an inheritance from the archangels when the planet was created, given directly to Adam. Every generation, in turn, inherits it as well:

'Tis Curiosity—who hath not felt
Its spirit, and before its altar knelt?
In the pleased infant see its power expand,
When first the coral fills his little hand;
Throned in his mother's lap, it dries each tear,
As her sweet legend falls upon his ear;
Next it assails him in his top's strange hum,
Breathes in his whistle, echoes in his drum;
Each gilded toy, that doting love bestows,
He longs to break and every spring expose.

On the same day 17 years later, on August 27, 1846, Rev. James Freeman Clarke gave his own Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard. He sets the tone for his own poem (which apparently was not titled) in the first stanza:

No high, heroic song, no lyric lay,
No lover's tale, shall win your ears-today;
A serious purpose claims the earnest Muse—
Our Country, and its Hopes, the theme I choose.

Clarke says that humanity has become "narrow, selfish, blind." Patriotism, he notes, is somewhat treasonous because the true aims of the Founding Fathers have never been met:

They framed our Union on the broadest plan;
The Equality and Brotherhood of man.

Clarke then roundly attacks the concepts of slavery and the hypocrisy of calling the United States a "free" country "except a Slave be fettered at its base!" Clarke's poem may have been too political for Harvard in 1846; he later wrote "most of the papers said [it] was not artistic."

Great Astronomical Discoveries

Reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, the August 25, 1835 issue of The New York Sun newspaper, reported on "Great Astronomical Discoveries" made by John Herschel, a well-known British astronomer. Herschel had invented a particularly strong telescope, with which he was able to observe the surface of the moon. The article asserted that Herschel's discoveries would forever mark this age one of the greatest in human knowledge.

After a long description of the telescope itself and how it works, the article ends with this tantalizing suggestion: "He expressed confidence in his ultimate ability to study even the entomology of the moon, in case she contained insects upon her surface." Insects! Five more installments followed this first article, each describing more impressive observations. Herschel had witnessed with his own eyes the true nature of the moon: trees, oceans, beaches, mountains. Readership of The Sun increased rapidly as these descriptions continued over the next few days. Most shocking were the reports of the moon's animal life: bison, goats, unicorns, and even humanoid creatures with bat-like wings. The society on the moon looked something like this:

Of course, none of these reports were true. Today called "The Great Moon Hoax," it has become one of the most legendary hoaxes in the history of journalism. The Sun never issued a retraction, nor did it ever reveal the true author (today assumed to be Richard A. Locke, a reporter for that newspaper). John Herschel, a real astronomer living at the time, apparently had no prior knowledge about the hoax.

Its major impact, perhaps, was its influence on a young author, who later published his own hoax in the same newspaper years later. That writer, Edgar Allan Poe, had actually published his own moon-related hoax (today known as "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall") only two months before the "Great Moon Hoax" in The Sun — but the impact of that hoax was nil, as it was quickly overshadowed.

*Recommended reading The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman.

Melville and Hawthorne: shrouded in blackness

Herman Melville claimed that he wrote his review of Mosses from an Old Manse just before he met Nathaniel Hawthorne. The second of two installments of "Hawthorne and His Mosses" was published in The Literary World on August 24, 1850. The collection included such classic Hawthorne tales as "The Birth-Mark," "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and his anti-Transcendentalist allegory "The Celestial Rail-road."

Melville, oddly, signed his review as "a Virginian spending July in Vermont." More than any other reviewer in the four years since Hawthorne's collection was published, Melville noticed that the stories emphasized a negative side of human nature. Most others had noticed his focus on stories with a moral, noting the positive aspect of teaching a lesson to general readers. Melville noted:

You may be witched by his sunlight—transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you; but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.

Melville believed "this black conceit pervades him through and through." Hawthorne's writing was "shrouded in blackness, ten times black." That dark view of humanity must have influenced Melville's own writing. The author most known for his book Typee and its sequel Omoo was then working on a far deeper novel, one which explored the dark recesses of human nature. When the book was published later that year, Moby-Dick included this dedication:

In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

J.G.C. Brainard: the notes of that funereal drum

Oliver Hazard Perry (pictured at right from a portrait by Gilbert Stuart) was nicknamed the "Hero of Lake Erie" for his role in the Battle of Lake Erie, September 1813. This sea confrontation was a major victory for the Americans during the War of 1812; Perry's own legacy includes a national monument in his honor near the site of the battle. Born in Rhode Island on August 23, 1785, Perry died of yellow fever on his birthday in 1819; he was 34 years old.

Born a little further east ten years after Perry was Connecticut poet John Gardiner Calkins Brainard. Brainard became fairly well-known but he too died in his 30s. Brainard paid tribute to Perry in a poem, "On the Death of Commodore Oliver H. Perry":

How sad the notes of that funereal drum,
  That's muffled by indifference to the dead!
And how reluctantly the echoes come,
  On air that sighs not o'er that stranger's bed,
  Who sleeps with death alone.—O'er his young head
His native breezes never more shall sigh;
  On his lone grave the careless step shall tread,
And pestilential vapors soon shall dry
Each shrub that buds around—each flower that blushes nigh.

Let Genius, poising on her full-fledged wing,
  Fill the charmed air with thy deserved praise:
Of war, and blood, and carnage let her sing,
  Of victory and glory!—let her gaze
  On the dark smoke that shrouds the cannon's blaze—
On the red foam that crests the bloody billow;
  Then mourn the sad close of thy shortened days—
Place on thy country's brow the weeping willow,
And plant the laurels thick, around thy last cold pillow.

No sparks of Grecian fire to me belong:
  Alike uncouth the poet and the lay;
Unskilled to turn the mighty tide of song,
  He floats along the current as he may,
  The humble tribute of a tear to pay.
Another hand may choose another theme...

But if the wild winds of thy western lake
  Might teach a harp, that fain would mourn the brave,
And sweep those strings the minstrel may not wake,
  Or give an echo from some secret cave
  That opens on romantic Erie's wave,
The feeble chord would not be swept in vain;
  And though the sound might never reach thy grave,
Yet there are spirits here, that to the strain
Would send a still small voice responsive back again.

And though the yellow plague infest the air;
  Though noxious vapors blight the turf, where rest
The manly form, and the bold heart of war;
  Yet should that deadly isle afar be blest!
  For the fresh breezes of thy native west
Should seek and sigh around thy early tomb,
  Moist with the tears of those who loved thee best,
Scented with sighs of love—there grief should come,
And mem'ry guard thy grave, and mourn thy hapless doom.

It may not be. Too feeble is the hand,
  Too weak and frail the harp, the lay too brief
To speak the sorrows of a mourning land,
  Weeping in silence for her youthful chief.
  Yet may an artless tear proclaim more grief
Than mock affection's arts can ever show;
  A heart-felt sigh can give a sad relief,
Which all the sobs of counterfeited woe,
Tricked off in foreign garb, can ever hope to know.

The fearful lessons of man's fate

Born in Connecticut in 1803, Harvey D. Little did not move to Ohio until he was 12 or 13 years old. He would, however, spend the rest of his life there, mostly in the city of Columbus. A lawyer by training, he was a newspaperman and editor by trade. His main employment was with the Eclectic and Medical Botanist, which he managed until his death due to cholera on August 22, 1833. He was 31 years old and left behind a wife and young child (two other children had died young; by some accounts, they died only days earlier).

He wrote poetry as well, though he never published them in book form. Most were published in a St. Clairsville newspaper under the pseudonym Valesques. A member of the Columbus Typographical Society, Little was given a memorial three months after his death by that organization.

His poem "Away, away, I scorn them all":

Away, away, I scorn them all,
  The mirthful board, the joyous glee;
The laughter of the festive hall;
  The long wild shouts of revelry;
To their vain worshipers they bring
Seasons of bitter sorrowing.

But, oh, by far the wiser part,
  To visit that secluded spot,
Where death hath quench'd some faithful heart,
  And closed, for aye, its varied lot:
For there, beside the funeral urn,
Lessons of wisdom we may learn.

The brief but busy scenes of life—
  Its fickle pleasures, and its woes—
Its mingled happiness and strife—
  Its fearful and its final close,
Pass through the mind in swift review,
With all their colorings strictly true.

We see the littleness of man—
  The end of all his pride and power:—
Scarce has his pilgrimage began
  E'er death's dark clouds upon him lower;
And rank, and pomp, and greatness, flee
Like meteor gleams!—and where is he?

Yes, where is he, whose mighty mind
  Could soar beyond the bounds of space,
And in some heavenly planet find
  The spirit's final resting place?
Gone! gone, in darkness, down to dust!
"Ashes to ashes," mingle must.

Well may we learn from life's last scene,
  The fearful lessons of man's fate:
How frail the barriers between
  The living and the dead's estate.
The elastic air—the vital breath—
Is but the link 'twixt life and death.

The pleasures of getting lost in the woods

Margaret Fuller was visiting Concord, Massachusetts, staying at the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She paid a visit to Nathaniel Hawthorne, recently married to Sophia Peabody, at what is now called The Old Manse. Fuller later noted that, while the two were walking together, they paused to look at the moon: "H[awthorne] said he should be much more willing to die than two months ago, for he had had some real possession in life, but still he never wished to leave this earth: it was beautiful enough." She accidentally left a book at Hawthorne's house, however.

The next day, August 21, 1842, she went to retrieve her book (though she got sidetracked). Hawthorne had already returned it to Emerson's house by then. Returning home, he came upon Fuller herself, sitting in Sleepy Hollow (not yet a cemetery). Despite Hawthorne's characteristic shyness and general avoidance of other people, he decided to join her.

They talked "about Autumn," Hawthorne recorded, "and about the pleasures of getting lost in the woods... and about other matters of high and low philosophy." Another voice interrupted them, and Emerson emerged from the trees. The conversation did not continue for too long after. "It being now nearly six o'clock, we separated," wrote Hawthorne, "Mr. Emerson and Margaret towards his house and I towards mine." Fuller's version of the day: "What a happy, happy day... all clear light. I cannot write about it."

The incident is certainly an obvious exception to Hawthorne's reclusive reputation. Fuller, renowned for her natural ability for conversation, must have been equally impressed by Hawthorne (who, you'll note, referred to her by her first name). It has been suggested that Hawthorne based the character of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter at least partially on Fuller; a character in The Blithedale Romance is more obviously inspired by her. In fact, Fuller is mentioned in that 1852 novel:

"Priscilla," I inquired, "did you ever see Miss Margaret Fuller?"
"No," she answered.
"Because," said I, "you reminded me of her, just now..."

The author's wife, Sophia, was a participant in Fuller's "Conversations" (held at the bookstore owned by her sister Elizabeth Peabody; the Hawthornes were married in the same place) and was strongly impressed by her. In fact, Hawthorne got a bit jealous that his "Dove" (as he called his wife) was listening to Fuller more than himself: "Would that Miss Margaret Fuller might lose her tongue! — or my Dove her ears."

Speaking of wives, Emerson's wife Lidian grew to be concerned over how much time her husband spent with Fuller. She burst into tears at one point while hosting Fuller at the house. Fuller calmed her down by assuring her: "He has affection for me, but it is because I quicken his intellect."

*Much of the information from this post comes from Hawthorne in Concord by Philip McFarland and Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller by Joan Von Mehren.

When the Great Gray Ships Come In

The Spanish-American War was halted in mid-August 1898 when a Protocol of Peace between Spain and the United States was signed. A squadron of American ships returned to New York Harbor on August 20, 1898. Guy Wetmore Carryl, mostly known as a humorist (if you can say he is known at all), wrote a poem commemorating their arrival, "When the Great Gray Ships Come In":

To eastward ringing, to westward winging,
     o'er mapless miles of sea,
On winds and tides the gospel rides that the
     furthermost isles are free.
And the furthermost isles make answer,
     harbor, and height, and hill,
Breaker and beach cry each to each, "'Tis
     the Mother who calls! Be still!"
Mother! new-found, beloved, and strong
     to hold from harm,
Stretching to these across the seas the shield
     of her sovereign arm,
Who summoned the guns of her sailor sons,
     who bade her navies roam,
Who calls again to the leagues of main, and
     who calls them this time Home!

And the great gray ships are silent, and the
     weary watchers rest.
The black cloud dies in the August skies, and
     deep in the golden west
Invisible hands are limning a glory
     of crimson bars,
And far above is the wonder of a myriad
     wakened stars!
Peace! As the tidings silence the strenuous
     cannonade,
Peace at last! is the bugle blast the length of
     the long blockade,
And eyes of vigil weary are lit with the glad
     release.
From ship to ship and from lip to lip it is
     "Peace! Thank God for peace."

Ah, in the sweet hereafter Columbia still
     shall show
The sons of these who swept the seas how
     she bade them rise and go, —
How, when the stirring summons smote on
     her children's ear,
South and North at the call stood forth, and
     the whole land answered, "Here!"
For the soul of the soldier's story and the
     heart of the sailor's song
Are all of those who meet their foes as right
     should meet with wrong,
Who fight their guns till the foeman runs,
     and then, on the decks they trod.
Brave faces raise, and give the praise to the
     grace of their country's God!

Yes, it is good to battle, and good to be strong
     and free.
To carry the hearts of a people to the uttermost
      ends of sea.
To see the day steal up the bay where the
     enemy lies in wait.
To run your ship to the harbor's lip and sink
     her across the strait: —
But better the golden evening when the ships
     round heads for home.
And the long gray miles slip swiftly past in
     a swirl of seething foam,
And the people wait at the haven's gate to
     greet the men who win!
Thank God for peace! Thank God for peace,
     when the great gray ships come in!

Poe: the fury of a demon

From Wikimedia Commons

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not—and very surely do I not dream... My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events.

Thus begins "The Black Cat," a short story by Edgar A. Poe, first published in the August 19, 1843 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. The "mere household events" which the narrator then describes are anything but ordinary. The narrator, afflicted with what is today termed alcoholism, becomes violent in his drunkenness. For no significant reason, he vents his rage onto his favorite pet, a black cat named Pluto:

One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.

After some initial lament for his actions, the narrator is again seized by his "spirit of Perverseness" and kills Pluto by hanging him from a tree. Shortly after, his house catches fire, and he and his wife move to another home. A stray cat mysteriously arrives and joins them. This new cat looks unnervingly like Pluto — equally black but for a small white patch of fur which, to the narrator, looks like a gallows. Of course, this cat is also missing an eye. Tormented by this new cat, another alcohol-fueled rage leads to the narrator's final gruesome act which involves his cat, his wife, and a sharp axe.

"The Black Cat" is one of Poe's most violent tales. But, Poe's shocking tale was purposely extreme and, despite his public dismissal of didactic tales, "The Black Cat" features a moral: don't abuse alcohol. Today, the story is considered a "dark temperance" tale, meant to scare readers away from the evils of drinking. Having recently read Timothy Shay Arthur's temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, I easily see the similar methods in storytelling.

Poe, of course, struggled with his own overuse of alcohol. As such, he vowed to remain sober. A few years after "The Black Cat" was published, he took a stronger step and joined the Sons of Temperance in Richmond, Virginia, making his pledge to avoid alcohol a public one.

Wilson: slavery's shadows fall even there

On August 18, 1859, Harriet E. Wilson copyrighted her novel, Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Rediscovered in the 20th century, it is considered the first novel by an African-American female. Her book is also an early depiction of the laboring class and, possibly, the first to consider female farm servants. In opposition to the usual rural idyll of pastoral stories, Wilson depicts her main character, a mulatto named Alfrado (or "Frado" for short), as one of the most marginalized members of society: an African-American female servant.

Often compared with autobiographical slave narratives like those by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson's book defies the category because of one simple fact: the book is not about a slave. Frado is a free woman, after all.

Frado is an indentured servant, only required to work for a predetermined amount of time after being given up by her parents. Her years with the Bellmont family, however, were awful: she was mistreated and abused. Her indentured servitude ends and she eventually marries a fugitive slave named Tom. Wilson notes, "He never spoke of his enslavement to her when alone, but she felt that, like her own oppression, it was painful to disturb oftener than was needful."

As the title page of Our Nig  announces, Wilson intended the book would show that, in the north, "slavery's shadows fall even there." Though a free woman, Frado suffers immensely because of her race.

Wilson herself had been an indentured servant. After her servitude, she suffered from poor health and had difficulty supporting herself and her young son. She wrote her novel for the potential income, as she notes in her preface. It likely was not much of a help: no contemporary reviews of the book have been found.

Gilman: no trouble to anyone

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was always suspicious of modern medicine. Her "hysteria" led to her forced "rest therapy," which only made her more frustrated. Her story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), fictionalizes her experience. In 1932, she was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer.

She was living in Pasadena, California at the time, along with her husband (the artist Frank Tolles Chamberlin) and two of their children. She came to the conclusion that her work was done and she was ready to die. She spent the evening of Saturday, August 17, 1935 with her family. She then went to bed, placed a chloroform-soaked screen on her face, and died peacefully in her sleep by 11:30 p.m. She had left a note: "I have preferred chloroform to cancer."

About ten years earlier, in July 1925, Gilman predicted that she had ten years of life left — a shockingly accurate prediction. Her suicide also resembled a fictional one she described in her 1912 book Forerunner. In the book, she noted her approval of the "good taste... in suicide" of a fictional "well-bred" woman who was found in her bed after using chloroform — "no trouble to anyone." In the real-life suicide, Gilman's family did not notify police until Monday; her body was cremated the next day. Her ashes were spread in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Gilman grabbed control of her own life and, in a sense, her death was in accordance with her values. She had been an advocate for women's rights, and her story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," is considered a major work of feminist thought. Fannie Hurst, a novelist, noted that Gilman "died as wisely as she lived." A friend and activist named Hattie Howe wrote of her friend as: "Indomitable, valiant, she was never vanquished, she even conquered death."

Her final work, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, appeared posthumously in October 1935. Gilman hoped the book would "stir some women" to become "a mover of others."

*Much of the information in this post comes from Cynthia Davis's Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (2010).

Hayne and Simms: whom I love & respect

Few writers define the American South as well as William Gilmore Simms (primarily remembered as a novelist) and Paul Hamilton Hayne (called "The Poet Laureate of the South"). Both were born in Charleston, South Carolina, though 24 years apart.

Hayne, the younger of the two, considered Simms an unofficial mentor in his early career, before they had even met. In the 1860s, they became acquainted and soon were friends. Simms was a booster for Russell Magazine, which Haynes edited. But, Simms was also a literary critic, one who often was a bit acidic in his reviews. In 1859, he reviewed Haynes's collection Avolio: A Legend of the Island of Cos and, though he liked the book, noted the poet's shortcomings, a "lack of care and finish." He identified his "defects" as focusing too much on the overuse of "superlatives and compound epithets" and for writing far too many sonnets.

Even as the two writers became friends, Hayne occasionally thought Simms was too harsh. In his journal on August 15, 1864, he noted that this "venerable critic (whom I love & respect)" is crotchety:

If his criticisms are now & then profound & suggestive, they are more frequently distinguished by principles partial & one-sided; nay! sometimes absolutely puerile!

Elsewhere, Hayne noted that Simms was an "old fellow on his high horse!" — though he also admitted: "I don't mind him in the least; he means well." Simms, in turn, referred to Hayne as "my dear Paul" and "the younger brother of my guild."

Below is an untitled sonnet collected in Hayne's Avolio:

Here, friend! upon this lofty ledge sit down!
And view the beauteous prospect spread below,
Around, above us; in the noon-day glow
How calm the landscape rests! — 'yon distant town,
Enwreathed with clouds of foliage like a crown
Of rustic honor; the soft, silvery flow
Of the clear stream beyond it, and the show
Of endless wooded heights, circling the brown
Autumnal fields, alive with billowy grain;
Say! hast thou ever gazed on aught more fair
In Europe, or the Orient? — what domain
(From India to the sunny slopes of Spain)
Hath beauty, wed to grandeur in the air,
Blessed with an ampler charm, a more benignant reign?

Dana: the day fixed upon for the sailing

The problem with maritime narratives, wrote Richard Henry Dana, Jr., is that they are usually written by officers, "gentlemen 'with his gloves on'." So, Dana told his own story, describing his two years as a sailor "before the mast" or "a voice from the forecastle."

The experience that became the subject of his 1840 book Two Years Before the Mast started on August 14, 1834. That day, aboard the brig Pilgrim, Dana left the port of Boston on the way to California. As he described:

The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim on her voyage from Boston round Cape Horn to the western coast of North America... I had undertaken [the voyage] from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my pursuits, and which no medical aid seemed likely to cure.

The change in young Dana's life was extreme — and sudden. His family was a well-known (and well-off) one. An ancestor, Francis Dana, had been a member of the Continental Congress and Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. His father (and namesake) was an accomplished poet, novelist, and somewhat controversial literary critic and editor. Dana, Jr. left the ranks of Harvard students, tossing aside his "tight dress coat, silk cap, and kid gloves" in exchange for "loose duck trowsers, checked shirt and tarpaulin hat of a sailor." Despite his attempts to look like "a jack tar... as salt as Neptune himself," he was soon recognized as a "landsman."

By the end of his voyage, he was a landsman no more. He did not return to Boston until September 1836. Thereafter, his eye troubles did not seem to bother him. Years later, he sailed to Europe with friends — a trip which reinforced how much he loved his own country (though he ultimately died in Rome).

His book about his two years at sea is still moderately well-known. Dana Point, California is named after him. The Pilgrim has been recreated and an annual regatta also celebrates the author.

Friday the 13th: A dose of its own poison

First and foremost, Thomas William Lawson was a businessman (as depicted in the cartoon at left) though he also published a handful of books. Born in 1857, he was 50 years old when he published his novel Friday the Thirteenth in 1907.

Lawson earned his first million by the age of 30 through investments in the stock market. His first writing for the public was a humorous glossary of baseball terms published in 1888. He also patented a baseball card game. In 1899, he partnered with William Rockefeller in copper mining. By the turn of the century, he built a massive estate outside of Boston named "Dreamworld" (a tower still stands); it was there that he wrote his novel.

Lawson, though accused of dubious practices himself, was interested in reforming Wall Street. Friday the Thirteenth features a broker who chooses that day to destroy the market. As one of the characters announces:

"I have been giving Wall Street and its hell 'System' a dose of its own poison, a good full-measure dose. They planned by harvesting a fresh crop of human hearts and souls on the bull side to give Friday the 13th a new meaning. Tradition says Friday the 13th is bear Saints' day. I believe in maintaining old traditions, so I harvested their hearts instead."

The book is surprisingly well written, as evidenced in this beautiful description of the fateful day:

Friday, the 13th... drifted over Manhattan Island in a drear drizzle of marrow-chilling haze, which just missed being rain—one of those New York days that give a hesitating suicide renewed courage to cut the mortal coil.

The end of Lawson's career was as meteoric a failure as his early success. He wrote a series of columns for a newspaper called "Frenzied Finance" (later collected as a book under the same title), he attacked the so-called "money kings" of finance (despite being one himself) and revealed unscrupulous deal-making behind closed doors. The articles alienated him from potential business partners and clients. Another copper mining company was less successful and he lost much of his own fortune. He died in dire financial circumstances in 1925. Talk about bad luck...

Bates: From sea to shining sea!

Though she wrote several collections of poetry, travel essays, and children's books, Katharine Lee Bates is today remembered only for one work. Born on August 12, 1859 in Falmouth, Massachusetts, Bates lost her father when she was only a month old. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1880 and later returned there to teach English for four decades.

She spent a semester in Colorado (where she met Woodrow Wilson) and, with other visiting faculty members at Colorado College, took a wagon ride across the prairies. She was so moved, she wrote the poem which cemented her in literary history: "America the Beautiful" was published on Independence Day in 1895; it was almost immediately set to music.

O beautiful for spacious skies,
  For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
  Above the fruited plain!
    America! America!
  God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
  From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
  Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
  Across the wilderness!
    America! America!
  God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
  Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
  In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
  And mercy more than life!
    America! America!
  May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
  And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
  That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
  Undimmed by human tears!
    America! America!
  God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
  From sea to shining sea!

Bates lived with fellow Wellesley faculty member Katharine Coman for 25 years. Historians still debate if the relationship was purely platonic, living in a "Boston marriage," or if they were a romantic couple. Bates is memorialized with a statue in Colorado and in her birthplace of Falmouth. There was some discussion that "America the Beautiful" should become the national anthem; of course, the anthem remains that poem by Francis Scott Key.

The Prince of Glory for sinners bled

The "Radical Republican" Thaddeus Stevens died on August 11, 1868. A major member of the House of Representatives (on behalf of Pennsylvania, though he was born in Vermont) during the Civil War years, Stevens endorsed the end of slavery and set the course for Reconstruction in the South, knowing that the South needed to be guided through those years. He met with resistance from President Andrew Johnson and called for his impeachment (he was the first President to be impeached but was acquitted).

The Ohio-born poet Phoebe Cary paid poetic tribute to Stevens shortly after his death. Cary (along with her sister Alice) was a published poet with the help of Rufus Griswold. Later, she was an advocate for women's rights and an occasional salon hostess in New York City. Her poem elevates Stevens as a major heroic figure.

An eye with the piercing eagle's fire.
Not the look of the gentle dove;
Not his the form that men admire.
Nor the face that tender women love.

Working first for his daily bread
With the humblest toilers of the earth;
Never walking with free, proud tread —
Crippled and halting from his birth,

Wearing outside a thorny suit
Of sharp, sarcastic, stinging power;
Sweet at the core as sweetest fruit,
Or inmost heart of fragrant flower.

Fierce and trenchant, the haughty foe
Felt his words like a sword of flame;
Rut to the humble, poor, and low
Soft as a woman's his accents came.

Not his the closest, tenderest friend —
No children blessed his lonely way;
But down in his heart until the end
The tender dream of his boyhood lay.

His mother's faith he held not fast;
But he loved her living, mourned her dead.
And he kept her memory to the last
As green as the sod above her bed.

He held as sacred in his home
Whatever things she wrought or planned,
And never suffered change to come
To the work of her "industrious hand."

For her who pillowed first his head
He heaped with a wealth of flowers the grave.
While he chose to sleep in an unmarked bed,
By his Master's humblest poor — the slave!

Suppose he swerved from the straightest course —
That the things he should not do he did —
That he hid from the eyes of mortals, close.
Such sins as you and I have hid?

Or suppose him worse than you; what then?
Judge not, lest you be judged for sin!
One said who knew the hearts of men:
Who loveth much shall a pardon win.

The Prince of Glory for sinners bled;
His soul was bought with a royal price;
And his beautified feet on flowers may tread
To-day with his Lord in Paradise.

*The images of Thaddeus Stevens and Phoebe Cary both come from Old-Picture.com, an amazing educational resource which compiles hundreds of 19th-century photos.

Dickinson: I like the school very much indeed

Emily Dickinson completed her final term at the Amherst Academy on August 10, 1847. She was 16 years old. As was the tradition, graduates presented public orations; Dickinson was one of them. A "choir of young girls and several youths" also performed; some speculate Dickinson was a member of that choir.

Dickinson presenting a public oration and singing before a crowd seems out of character for her. Soon, Dickinson will, infamously, become a recluse who seldom leaves the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Still a teenager, however, she will instead prepare for college; her first term at Mount Holyoke College began just over a month after her graduation from Amherst Academy.

Dickinson was enrolled at the Academy when she was nine. She studied Latin, Greek, geography, ancient history, botany, physiology, and English grammar. Dickinson seemed to enjoy her experience. At age 11, she wrote a letter to a friend: "I am in the class that you used to be in in Latin — besides Latin I study History and Botany I like the school very much indeed". She also began to show a precociousness and critical view of the world. In the same letter, she describes a fellow student giving an oral presentation: "the Subject was think twice before you speak," she wrote. The boy told the class that he knew a man who believed a woman was so beautiful she neared perfection. But, he warned, "remember that roses conceal thorns." Young Dickinson was not happy. "He is the sillyest creature that ever lived I think... I told him that I thought he had better think twice before he spoke."

She was, by most accounts, an impressive student. Her principal later wrote of her: "I remember her as a very bright but rather delicate and frail looking girl... an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties; but somewhat shy and nervous." His recollections were written after Dickinson's death and can be taken with a grain of salt.

From her poem today labeled "XXI":

Not in this world to see his face
Sounds long, until I read the place
Where this is said to be
But just the primer of life
Unopened, rare, upon the shelf,
Clasped yet to him and me.

And yet, my primer suits me so
I would not choose a book to know
Than that, be sweeter wise;
Might some one else so learned by,
And leave me just my A B C,
Himself could have the skies.

*Some of the information for this post comes from Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief by Roger Lundin.

Walden published; waxwork yellowing

According to an 1854 journal entry by Henry David Thoreau:

Wednesday Aug 9th To Boston Walden Published. Elder berries XXX. Waxwork yellowing X.

Thoreau may have been understating his excitement over the first publication of what became his most famous book. In the week between receiving his sample copy and the official publication date, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson noted Thoreau was "walking up & down Concord, firm-looking, but in a tremble of great expectation."

The slender book was published by Ticknor & Fields; Thoreau went into Boston that day for the personal copies he was given for his own distribution to friends. Copies were given to Bronson Alcott, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and others.

Contrary to popular assumption, Thoreau did not write Walden at Walden Pond. His two year, two month, and two day-long stay at his modest cabin was, in fact, the period in which he wrote about his excursions on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He began writing Walden as early as 1846 and spent the winter of 1854 correcting his manuscript.Thoreau intended his time at the cabin by the pond to be an exploration of nature — both the world around him, and the world within. From his chapter "Where I lived and what I lived for":

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry,—determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream ? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigour, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses... Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that allusion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is.

Verplanck and a young Irish greyhound

Hoping to avoid controversy, the provost of Columbia College struck out a few passages from the speech to be delivered at Commencement on August 8, 1811. The student who was to speak, identified as "Stevenson," included some lines about elected officials being obligated to "obey the will of constituents." Despite being told not to, Stevenson read the lines anyway — and he was privately informed he would not receive his degree that day.

Even so, Stevenson took his turn walking up to the platform and demanded his diploma. A man named Hugh Maxwell (Columbia class of '08, future state attorney general) sprang to the platform and appealed to the audience on behalf of Stevenson. Chaos ensued: shouts, applause, hisses. Finally, Gulian C. Verplanck (of Columbia's class of 1801) appeared on stage and said, "The reasons are not satisfactory. Mr. Maxwell must be supported... the thanks of the audience [should] be given to Mr. Maxwell for his spirited defence of an injured man."

Verplanck, Maxwell, and others were brought to court for causing a riot. The accuser was the mayor of New York (also a former U.S. senator, a state senator, and future governor), DeWitt Clinton, who called the incident a shameless outrage. They were found guilty and each was fined $200 (others involved were fined slightly less).

Verplanck, a future politician himself, was apparently the main target of Clinton's. Verplanck noticed and, using the pseudonym of Abimelech Coody, made Clinton the subject of satirical attacks for years. Clinton was referred to as "a young Irish greyhound of high mettle and exorbitant pretensions." Clinton responded with his own pamphlet, An Account of Abimelech Coody and Other Celebrated Worthies of New York, in a Letter from a Traveller. Clinton also targeted Verplanck's friends James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. The anonymous Coody pamphlets were never officially linked to Verplanck, though many guessed correctly.

The original incident, the student not being allowed to speak a few lines, was entirely political. Stevenson clearly had Federalist leanings. Officials at Columbia — and De Witt Clinton — were Democratic-Republicans. A short time later, a group of former Federalists nominated Clinton for President of the United States.

Birth of Joseph Rodman Drake

Recognized in his lifetime mostly for his poems "The Culprit Fay" and "The American Flag," Joseph Rodman Drake was born on August 7, 1795 in New York. He is today known just as much for his friendship with Fitz-Greene Halleck, who became the more popular poet (and was more than a little obsessed with Drake).

Drake was part of a first generation of American poets who mostly tried to emulate British writers, usually with excessively didactic purposes. Yet, that same first generation recognized a need to break away thematically from European traditions. A conversation on the idea between Drake, Halleck, and James Fenimore Cooper led to "The Culprit Fay."

The poem, which does not feature a single human character, explores the American scenery: Drake set the poem mostly in the lands surrounding the Hudson River. It is a lengthy poem which deviates which uses an ever-changing metric structure. The end result of three days writing,  A fantastic mix of nature and mythology, "The Culprit Fay" is an interesting exploration of early American poetry:

'Tis the middle watch of a summer's night
The earth is dark, but the heavens are bright;
Naught is seen in the vault on high
But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky,
And the flood which rolls its milky hue,
A river of light on the welkin blue...

The stars are on the moving stream,
   And fling, as its ripples gently flow,
A burnished length of wavy beam
   In an eel-like, spiral line below;
The winds are whist, and the owl is still;
   The bat in the shelvy rock is hid;
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp, and the answer shrill
       Of the gauze-winged katydid;
And the plaint of the wailing whippoorwill,
Who moans unseen and ceaseless sings,
   Ever a note of wail and woe...

The poem then introduces a series of fantasy creatures, including elves and fairies (one wears an acorn for a helmet)... and more:

The goblin marked his monach well;
   He spake not, but he bowed him low,
Then plucked a crimson colen-bell,
   And turned him round in act to go.
The way is long; he cannot fly;
   His soiled wing has lost its power,
And he winds adown the mountain high
   For many a sore and weary hour.

Drake was only 25 years old when he died in 1820.

Tramping over the soil

August 5, 1850 may have been the most exciting day in American literary history. A band of now-recognized literary giants (and a couple less gigantic) climbed Monument Mountain in western Massachusetts. According to the publisher James T. Fields:

I have just got back to my desk from the Berkshire Hills where we have been tramping over the soil with Hawthorne; dining with Holmes... and sitting... with Melville, the author of 'Typee.'

Fields, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Herman Melville were joined by editor Evert Augustus Duyckinck and writer Cornelius Mathews. Once at the top, they read William Cullen Bryant's poem "Monument Mountain," and passed around a single silver mug frequently replenished with champagne (a prescription brought along for the trip by Dr. Holmes).

Perhaps most important to this incident is that it marks the beginning of the friendship of Hawthorne and Melville, who had never previously met. Melville was so taken by the author of the recently-published The Scarlet Letter that he would soon earn the dedication of Moby-Dick, which he was then writing. Some suggest that Melville's infatuation with Hawthorne was more than merely literary admiration and that, perhaps, the younger author was developing a romantic interest. "Where Hawthorne is known,” Melville wrote a few days later, “he seems to be deemed... a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated—a man who means no meanings.”

Melville soon wrote a particularly flattering review of Mosses from an Old Manse, then old by about four years. His pseudonymous review, "Hawthorne and his Mosses," was published by Duyckinck in his weekly periodical Literary World. He was the first to notice that Hawthorne's tales were significantly dark: "shrouded in blackness, ten times black." Hawthorne wrote to Duyckinck later that month that he had "a progressive appreciation" of Melville. "No writer ever put the reality before his reader more unflinchingly than he does."

*Image above is courtesy of the Trustees of Reservations.

The Marriage of Melville

Shortly after the publication of Omoo, his sequel to Typee, Herman Melville married Elizabeth "Lizzie" Shaw, the daughter of Chief Justice of Massachusetts Lemuel Shaw. Judge Shaw had been friends with Melville's father, and Melville dedicated his first book to him. The marriage took place on August 4, 1847.

The couple spent their honeymoon in New Hampshire and Canada. They then moved into a large row house in Manhattan (purchased with the help of Justice Shaw). The household also included other members of the Melville family: brother Allan Melville and his wife, four unmarried sisters, his mother Maria Gansevoort Melville and, off and on, his brother Tom Melville.

The marriage was, by most accounts, disastrous or at least problematic. Lizzie never seemed to understand or appreciate her husband's writing (though she helped him as a copyist from time to time). His first work after marriage, Mardi, is peppered with condemnations or protests against marriage, praising bachelorhood instead. She considered leaving him in 1867, after twenty years of marriage and four children. In fact, her family and pastor seemed to support divorce. She chose to stay with Melville.

Of their four children, the oldest, Malcolm, committed suicide at 18 (shortly after Lizzie almost left Herman). Their second son, Stanwix, died of tuberculosis at age 35 while in San Francisco. Their daughter Bessie was crippled by extreme arthritis by age 26. Frances Melville, the second daughter, married happily and had four daughters.

Despite family tragedy, professional hardship, and a strained relationship full of rumors about affairs (today, she might take note of the rumors of homosexuality), Lizzie stayed with her husband and the couple tried to work everything out. With her help, Melville published three books of poetry at the end of his life; shortly before he died, he gave her an inscribed copy of his collection Weeds and Wildings. Carved in Lizzie's desk was the adage, "To know all is to forgive all."

*Some information for this post comes from The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Robert S. Levine.

Holmes: The dogma of inherited guilt

A true Renaissance man, Oliver Wendell Holmes had a long, storied life. He was a poet, a scholar/academic, a doctor,  medical reformer, coiner of new terms, inventor, and more. His first novel, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, was originally serialized for the Atlantic Monthly, before appearing in book form in 1861.

It had a long, successful run. After several republications, Holmes offered a new preface for the final edition he oversaw in his lifetime. Dated August 3, 1891, Holmes notes that the book "was not written for popularity, but with a very serious purpose." In fact, he was writing about the traditional belief in original sin."The only use of the story," the preface states, "is to bring the dogma of inherited guilt and its consequences into a clearer point of view."

The novel is one of the most interesting produced in the 19th century. It follows a young schoolmaster named Bernard Langdon to a small New England town, where he is immediately arrested by the strange yet alluring beauty of 17-year old Elsie Venner. Elsie is a unique, somewhat tortured character, who does not fit in with the striated social structures around her. Instead, she spends the night on the local mountain, a place where no others dare to go. She picks exotic flowers, rarely speaks, and saved Langdon's life from a striking cobra. Langdon, who sought Elsie's hiding place in the mountain, was exploring a cave when it happened:

His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small, sharp, cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth, steady motion towards the light, and himself... The two sparks of light came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all at once lifted themselves up as if in angry surprise. Then for the first time thrilled in Mr. Bernard's ears the dreadful sound ... — the long, loud, stinging whirr, as the huge, thickbodied reptile shook his many-jointed rattle and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke... He waited as in a trance, — waited as one that longs to have the blow fall, and all over, as the man who shall be in two pieces in a second waits for the axe to drop. But while he looked straight into the flaming eyes, it seemed to him that they were losing their light and terror, that they were growing tame and dull; the charm was dissolving, the numbness was passing away, he could move once more. He heard a light breathing close to his ear, and, half turning, saw the face of Elsie Venner, looking motionless into the reptile's eyes, which had shrunk and faded under the stronger enchantment of her own.

Elsie Venner is, after all, half snake.

Her lisp, her own poison-like nature, and her isolation from "normal" society bring to mind the nature of evil: can she overpower her own genetics which predisposes her to evil? What will be her fate if she does? I can't recommend this novel enough; if you enjoy Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, you simply must read Elsie Venner.

*Further recommended reading: Oliver Wendell Holmes: Physician and Man of Letters, a collection of essays (mostly on Holmes's medical career), edited by Scott Podolsky and Charles S. Bryan. I am thanked on the acknowledgments page. The book includes an essay by Peter Gibian, author of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation, probably the most complete book on the career of Holmes ever written.

A great Poe hoax

A headline in the August 2, 1877 issue of The Dispatch announced the discovery of a "Hitherto Unpublished Poem of the Lamented Edgar Allan Poe." The poem had been discovered inside the fly-leaf of an old book, apparently written as a gift. "After a thorough investigation," the paper noted, it was confirmed as a "genuine production" of Poe's, one never before been seen by the public.

The poem, titled "Leonainie," was dropped off by "an uneducated, illiterate man" who seemingly knew nothing of the value of this discovery. The poem, it was reported, was written in such good handwriting that it resembled a typeface. The editor proudly noted the poem was printed "verbatim," as follows:

Leonainie — angels named her;
And they took the light
Of the laughing stars and framed her
In a smile of white:
And they made her hair of gloomy
Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy
Moonshine, and they brought her to me
In the solemn night.

In a solemn night of summer,
When my heart of gloom
Blossomed up to meet the comer
Like a rose in bloom;
All the forebodings that distressed me
I forgot as joy caressed me —
(Lying joy that caught and pressed me
In the arms of doom!)

Only spake the little lisper
In the angel-tongue;
Yet I, listening, heard her whisper, —
"Songs are only sung
Here below that they may grieve you —
Tales are told you to deceive you —
So must Leonainie leave you
While her love is young."

Then God smiled and it was morning,
Matchless and supreme;
Heaven's glory seemed adorning
Earth with its esteem:
Every heart but mine seemed gifted
With the voice of prayer, and lifted
Where my Leonainie drifted
From me like a dream.

The poem caused quite a stir, and word spread through major cities like New York, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Boston, Chicago, Louisville... The problem? The poem is not by Edgar Allan Poe (though he would likely have enjoyed the ruse).

The whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by James Whitcomb Riley, who used the elaborate scheme to prove that good poems by unknown poets were ignored, whereas mediocre poems by well-known writers were accepted without question. The editor of The Dispatch was Riley's only accomplice.