Death of Phoebe Cary: Nearer Home

The Ohio-born Phoebe Cary died in Newport, Rhode Island on July 31, 1871, having outlived her sister Alice Cary by about five months. Her last few moments were allegedly restless, until she finally threw up her arms and called out, "O God, have mercy on my soul!" They were recorded as her last words.

It was said that she could not live without her sister, who had died of tuberculosis, but Phoebe also suffered from hepatitis. Alice had been laid to rest in New York's Green-Wood Cemetery in the frozen ground covered with snow; Phoebe's burial took place on a scorching, summer day. At her funeral, the choir read Phoebe's hymn "Nearer Home":

One sweetly solemn thought
    Comes to me o'er and o'er;
I am nearer home to-day
    Than I ever have been before;

Nearer my Father's house,
    Where the many mansions be;
Nearer the great white throne,
    Nearer the crystal sea;

Nearer the bound of life,
    Where we lay our burdens down;
Nearer leaving the cross,
    Nearer gaining the crown!

But lying darkly between,
    Winding down through the night,
Is the silent, unknown stream,
    That leads at last to the light.

Closer and closer my steps
    Come to the dread abysm:
Closer Death to my lips
    Presses the awful chrism.

Oh, if my mortal feet
    Have almost gained the brink;
If it be I am nearer home
    Even to-day than I think;

Father, perfect my trust;
    Let my spirit feel in death,
That her feet are firmly set
    On the rock of a living faith!

English: Give them the roll of the drum!

When Thomas Dunn English published The Boy's Book of Battle-Lyrics, he intended it to be a collection of "metrical narratives" (he refused to call them "poems") showing the military history of the United States. He realized, however, that the book would be far too long and, instead, settled for a representative rather than complete history. According to his preface, dated from Newark, New Jersey on July 30, 1885, he hoped to give the reader "a notion of the nature of the struggle by which these States emerged from a dependent condition to take high rank among the peoples of the world."

By the time of its publication, English was a published novelist, poet, editor, and politician. Each poem is different metrically, most are tediously long. English did, however, avoid references to the recent "sectional war" (i.e. the Civil War), with the exception of two selections (which he claimed were personal, not likely to offend anyone). One was titled "The Charge at the Ford," and English noted, "The story may be correct, or not. I do not vouch for its accuracy."

Eighty and nine with their captain
Rode on the enemy's track,
Rode in the grey of the morning:
Nine of the ninety came back.

Slow rose the mist from the river,
Lighter each moment the way;
Careless and tearless and fearless
Galloped they on to the fray.

Singing in tune, how the scabbard
Loud on the stirrup-irons rang
Clinked as the men rose in saddle,
Fell as they sank with a clang!

What is it moves by the river,
Faded and weary and weak?
Grey-backs—a cross on their banner—
Yonder the foe whom they seek.

Silence! They see not, they hear not,
Tarrying there by the marge;
Forward! Draw sabre! Trot! Gallop!
Charge like a hurricane! Charge!

Ah! 'twas a man-trap infernal;
Fire like the deep pit of hell!
Volley on volley to meet them,
Mixed with the grey rebels' yell.

Ninety had ridden to battle,
Tracing the enemy's track;
Ninety had ridden to battle,
Nine of the ninety came back.

Honor the nine of the ninety,
Honor the heroes who came
Scathless from nine hundred muskets,
Safe from the lead-bearing flame.

Eighty and one of the troopers
Lie on the field of the slain—
Lie on the red field of honor:
Honor the nine who remain.

Cold are the dead there, and gory,
There where their life-blood was spilt;
Back come the living, each sabre
Red from the point to the hilt.

Give them three cheers and a tiger!
Let the flags wave as they come!
Give them the blare of the trumpet!
Give them the roll of the drum!

Saxe: the mighty cord they call the Atlantic Cable

The first transatlantic wire was sent by telegraph on July 29, 1866; the first message was an exchange between Queen Victoria and President Andrew Johnson. Though this was not the first attempt, the momentous occasion, connecting the Old World with the New, inspired a poem by John Godrey Saxe in honor of the project's financier Cyrus West Field. The poem is titled "How Cyrus Laid the Cable":

Come, listen all unto my song;
     It is no silly fable;
'T is all about the mighty cord
     They call the Atlantic Cable.

Bold Cyrus Field he said, says he,
     "I have a pretty notion
That I can run a telegraph
     Across the Atlantic Ocean."

To carry out his foolish plan
     He never would be able;
He might as well go hang himself
     With his Atlantic Cable.

But Cyrus was a valiant man,
     A fellow of decision;
And heeded not their mocking words,
     Their laughter and derision.

Twice did his bravest efforts fail,
     And yet his mind was stable;
He wa'n't the man to break his heart
     Because he broke his cable.

"Once more, my gallant boys!" he cried;
     "Three times! — you know the fable
(I'll make it thirty," muttered he,
     "But I will lay the cable!").

Once more they tried, — hurrah! hurrah!
     What means this great commotion?
The Lord he praised! the cable's laid
     Across the Atlantic Ocean!

Loud ring the bells, — for, flashing through
     Six hundred leagues of water,
Old Mother England's benison
     Salutes her eldest daughter!

O'er all the land the tidings speed,
     And soon, in, every nation,
They'll hear about the cable with
     Profoundest admiration!

Now, long live President and Queen;
     And long live gallant Cyrus;
And may his courage, faith, and zeal
     With emulation fire us;

And may we honor evermore
     The manly, bold, and stable;
And tell our sons, to make them brave.
     How Cyrus laid the cable!

Cawein: an ode on The Republic

The "Keats of Kentucky," Madison Cawein wrote to his longtime correspondent Robert Edward Lee Gibson on July 27, 1912:

I am writing an ode on The Republic now, which I intend to be a protest against the attitude of the times, public and political, and a sort of appeal to God and the world of the lowly and the wise, for patience, etc. I think it is going to be a good poem, but don't know yet.

The poem which Cawein was writing, good or not, was published the next year in his book, The Republic: A Little Book of Homespun Verse. The title poem, "The Republic," filled nine pages. In it, Cawein criticizes politicians who "build authority" around "calumny and party hate." Instead, he elevates those who "sacrifice their honor for the State." He also rails against the "Proletariat," and calls for freedom and equality for all individuals. He believes that the chaos of current times will yield to peace and prosperity, if we are but patient and turn to God. After all, he writes, "God made our Country, wombing her with gold / And veining her with copper, iron, and coal." Here is just a short excerpt from the long poem:

By the long leagues of cotton Texas rolls,
And Mississippi bolls; a
By the wide seas of wheat
The far Dakotas beat
Against the barriers of the mountainland:
And by the miles of maize
Nebraska lays
Like a vast carpet in
Her House of Nights and Days,
Where, glittering, in council meet
The Spirits of the Cold and Heat,
With old Fertility whose heart they win:
By all the wealth replete
Within our scan,
From Florida to where the snows begin,
Made manifest of Nature unto Man—
Behold!
The Land is as a mighty scroll unrolled,
Whereon God writes His name
In harvest: green and gold
And russet making fair as oft of old
Each daedal part He decorates the same
With splendors manifold
Of mountains and of rivers, fruits and flowers;
Sealing each passage of the rubric Hours
With esoteric powers
Of life and love, and all their mystery,
Through which men yet may see
The truth that shall refute the fool that cries,
"God has forgot us and our great emprise!"

...God of the wise,

The meek and humble, who still look to Thee,
Holding to sanity

And truth and purpose of the great emprise.

Keep her secure,

And beautiful and pure

As when in ages past Thou didst devise,

Saying within Thy heart, "She shall endure!—

A great Republic!"—Let her course be sure,

O God, and, in detraction's spite,

Unquestionably right;

And in the night, 

If night there must be, light a beacon light

To guide her safely through the strife,

The conflict of her soul, with passions rife.

Miller: not fitted to advise

After gold was discovered in Alaska, the "Byron of Oregon" Joaquin Miller announced he was immediately headed north. Several newspapers wooed Miller to serve as a correspondent; he struck a deal with William Randolph Hearst and, on July 26, 1897, he took the steamer to Juneau. The correspondence and the trip both proved disastrous.

Known for his flamboyance and his ability to tell tales (often with very little truth in them), Miller aimed to impress his readers. He began writing his first dispatch before even reaching Alaska. The picture he painted was of an idyllic Eden, only a trifle cold, where anyone could live easily and comfortably with just a little money. Most, he suggested, would eventually strike it rich and earn millions. During his travels, he said, he carried with him a bouquet of newly-picked violets, fresh from the Alaska soil.

Miller himself traveled throughout Alaska, never once finding gold (all while writing back that gold was so plentiful that people stumbled over nuggets whenever they went out). When he heard about a treacherous trail through the Klondike, he set out on the 230-mile journey, fighting temperatures sometimes forty degrees below zero. He had a reputation as an adventurous frontiersman to uphold, after all. At 60 years old, Miller nearly died; luckily, he lost only two toes to frostbite. Of course, Miller never suggested he might have been wrong in his assessment of the Alaska as an easy-going paradise.

A critic of Miller allegedly confronted him for causing "the death of many fine men and the ruin of thousands." One journalist noted that Miller was taking advantage of his reputation as a famous writer but stressed that he "is not fitted to advise" gold-seekers. Miller considered suing for libel (but never did).

Thomas Eakins and Walt Whitman

Thomas Eakins was born in Philadelphia on July 25, 1844. He later became a painter and photographer. In the spring of 1887, he met the aging poet Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey. The two were kindred spirits, though the painter was a quarter century younger than the poet. Both threw aside conventions in their specific art form and attempted truly to represent reality. As Whitman said, "I never... knew [but] one artist, and that's Tom Eakins, who could resist the temptation to see what they think ought to be, rather than what is."

Eakins created several images of Whitman, both in paint and in photography (the subject of one of Eakins's nude photographs may or may not be Whitman as well — and that's not a euphemism, so clicker of links beware). Of his most famous image of Whitman, Eakins later noted: "I began in the usual ways but soon found that the ordinary methods wouldn't do — that technique, rules and traditions would have to be thrown aside; that before all else, he was to be treated as a man."

*I am indebted to the book Portrait: Life of Thomas Eakins (2006) by William S. McFeely.

I shall take the Community for a subject

In a letter to a friend dated July 24, 1851, about a year after the publication of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne speculated about a new novel — or, "romance," as he called them. He wrote, "When I write another romance, I shall take the Community for a subject, and shall give some of my experiences and observations at Brook Farm." The book he had in mind became The Blithedale Romance (1852).

Soon after writing this letter, he borrowed several books by Charles Fourier, whose theories re-shaped George Ripley's Utopian experiment in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Hawthorne, a founding member of Brook Farm (despite not being part of the community of Transcendentalists) and its one-time treasurer, was not part of the project when it turned to Fourierism. In a sense, then, Hawthorne stepped away from his own "experiences and observations." As he went on with his idea, he went further and further away from Brook Farm anyway, instead constructing a highly-fictionalized version or, as he described it, the story became "a faint... shadowing of Brook Farm." By the time he wrote to his friend, the critic Edwin Percy Whipple, his suggestions of potential titles show an emphasis on his fictional characters rather than the actual community.

In reality, Hawthorne cared little for Brook Farm, having joined not because of its ideals but because of promises of financial gain and ample time for intellectual pursuits (like writing). In fact, it had the opposite effect: "Even my Custom House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were freer," he wrote. Among his many farm-related duties was shoveling manure. "Thank God, my soul is not utterly buried under a dung-heap." It didn't take long for Hawthorne to realize the physical labor involved with farm life wasn't for him, calling it "the curse of the world." He worried it was making him "proportionately brutified." As for time to write, he noted, "I have no quiet at all."

Like Hawthorne, the main character of the book which became The Blithedale Romance realized that farm life was not conducive to creativity. Despite the fictionalization, there was still some real-life inspiration in the book; the protagonist, Miles Coverdale, arrives at the farm in a snowstorm, just like Hawthorne arrived at Brook Farm. Coverdale also displays Hawthorne's typical self-deprecation: "I am a poet, and, so the critics tell me, no great affair at that!" Further, at one point Coverdale refers to Robert Burns and notes: "He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet."

Grant: O stern-faced Chief

Only a few months before his death, General (and President) Ulysses S. Grant signed a contract to publish his memoir with a publishing house founded by Mark Twain. It became one of the highest-selling books of the century, but he only barely finished it before his death on July 23, 1885 (he is pictured at right in the process of writing that book).

The Irish-born political activist/poet/editor John Boyle O'Reilly offered this poetic tribute, simply titled "Grant—1885":

        Blessed are Pain, the smiter,
        And Sorrow, the uniter!
        For one afflicted lies—
        A symboled sacrifice—
        And all our rancor dies!

No North, no South! O stern-faced Chief,
One weeping ours, one cowled Grief—
Thy Country—bowed in prayer and tear—
For North and South—above thy bier!

For North and South! O Soldier grim,
The broken ones to weep for him
Who broke them! He whose terrors blazed
In smoking harvests, cities razed;
Whose Fate-like glance sent fear and chill;
Whose wordless lips spake deathless will—
Till all was shattered, all was lost—
All hands dropped down—all War's red cost
Laid there in ashes—Hope and Hate
And Shame and Glory!
                                     Death and Fate
Fall back! Another touch is thine;
He drank not of thy poisoned wine,
Nor blindly met thy blind-thrown lance,
Nor died for sightless time or chance—
But waited, suffered, bowed and tried,
Till all the dross was purified;
Till every well of hate was dried;
And North and South in sorrow vied,
And then—at God's own calling—died!

What two poets heard that day

The First Battle of Bull Run (also called the First Battle of Manassas) was fought in Virginia on July 21, 1861; this first major land battle of the Civil War resulted in a Confederate victory. The Kentucky-born Sarah Morgan Bryan (who had recently married John James Piatt) was living nearby, outside of Washington, D.C. She wrote of the battle in her poem "Hearing the Battle":

One day in the dreamy summer,
On the Sabbath hills, from afar
We heard the solemn echoes
Of the first fierce words of war.

Ah, tell me, thou veiled Watcher
Of the storm and the calm to come,
How long by the sun or shadow
Till these noises again are dumb.

And soon in a hush and glimmer
We thought of the dark, strange fight,
Whose close in a ghastly quiet
Lay dim in the beautiful night.

Then we talk'd of coldness and pallor,
And of things with blinded eyes
That stared at the golden stillness
Of the moon in those lighted skies;

And of souls, at morning wrestling
In the dust with passion and moan,
So far away at evening
In the silence of worlds unknown.

But a delicate wind beside us
Was rustling the dusky hours,
As it gather'd the dewy odors
Of the snowy jessamine-flowers.

And I gave you a spray of the blossoms,
And said: "I shall never know
How the hearts in the land are breaking,
My dearest, unless you go."

For another perspective, Philadelphia-born George Henry Boker grabs attention in the first line of his poem "Upon the Hill Before Centreville" (also dated July 21, 1861) by almost directly answering Piatt:

I'll tell you what I heard that day:
I heard the great guns far away,
Boom after boom. Their sullen sound
Shook all the shuddering air around,
And shook, ah me! my shrinking ear,
And downward shook the hanging tear
That, in despite of manhood's pride,
Rolled o'er my face a scalding tide.
And then I prayed. O God! I prayed
As never stricken saint, who laid
His hot cheek to the holy tomb
Of Jesus, in the midnight gloom.

"What saw I?" Little. Clouds of dust;
Great files of men, with standards thrust
Against their course; dense columns crowned
With billowing steel. Then, bound on bound,
The long black lines of cannon poured
Behind the horses, streaked and gored
With sweaty speed. Anon shot by,
Like a lone meteor of the sky,
A single horseman; and he shone
His bright face on me, and was gone.

Amid "rolling drums," occasional "cheers," and the singing of "songs familiar to my ears," the speaker of the poem watches the battle much more closely than Piatt's narrator:

Beneath whose gloom of dusty smoke
The cannon flamed, the bomb-shell broke,
And the sharp rattling volley rang,
And shrapnel roared, and bullets sang,
And fierce-eyed men, with panting breath,
Toiled onward at the work of death...

Initially, the battle seemed to be in favor of the Union, and Boker's narrator briefly sees a soldier charging past who shouts that victory was theirs. He suddenly feels a stillness in the air ("All nature in the work of death / Paused for one last, despairing breath") before the battle turns in favor of the Confederates. Boker offers an ode to those Union troops who were already dead by the pause that preceded the Confederate victory:

O happy dead, who early fell,
Ye have no wretched tale to tell
Of causeless fear and coward flight,
Of victory snatched beneath your sight,
Of martial strength and honor lost,
Of mere life bought at any cost,
Of the deep, lingering mark of shame
Forever scorched on brow and name,
That no new deeds, however bright,
Shall banish from men's loathful sight!
Ye perished in your conscious pride,
Ere this vile scandal opened wide
A wound that cannot close nor heal;
Ye perished steel to levelled steel,
Stern votaries of the god of war,
Filled with his godhead to the core!
Ye died to live; these lived to die
Beneath the scorn of every eye!
How eloquent your voices sound
From the low chambers under ground!
How clear each separate title burns
From your high-set and laurelled urns!
While these, who walk about the earth,
Are blushing at their very birth;
And though they talk, and go and come,
Their moving lips are worse than dumb.
Ye sleep beneath the valley's dew,
And all the nation mourns for you.
So sleep, till God shall wake the lands!
For angels, armed with fiery brands,
Await to take you by the hands.

Much like Boker himself (who became one of the most prolific poets during the Civil War), his narrator is not merely a passive listener to the battle, as is Piatt's narrator. Instead, he suddenly shouts in the direction of battle:

I found a voice. My burning blood
Flamed up. Upon a mound I stood;
I could no more restrain my voice
Than could the prophet of God's choice.
"Back, howling fugitives," I cried,
"Back, on your wretched lives, and hide
Your shame beneath your native clay!
Or if the foe affrights you, slay
Your baser selves; and, dying, leave
Your children's tearful cheeks to grieve,
Not quail and blush, when you shall come,
Alive, to their degraded home!
Your wives will look askance with scorn;
Your boys, and infants yet unborn,
Will curse you to God's holy face!
Heaven holds no pardon in its grace
For cowards. O, are such as ye
The guardians of our liberty?
Back, if one trace of manhood still
May nerve your arm and brace your will!
You stain your country in the eyes
Of Europe and her monarchies!
The despots laugh, the peoples groan,
Man's cause is lost and overthrown!
I curse you, by the sacred blood
That freely poured its purple flood
Down Bunker's heights, on Monmouth's plain,
From Georgia to the rocks of Maine!
I curse you, by the patriot band
Whose bones are crumbling in the land!
By those who saved what these had won! —
In the high name of Washington!"

Death of Fanny Parnell

Before Fanny Parnell died in Trenton, New Jersey on July 20, 1882, she had expressed a wish for her body to be returned to her native Ireland. That country, at the time, was incorporated under Great Britain, and Irish nationalists often violently expressed their desire for independence. One of those activists was Fanny's brother Charles Parnell. Fanny had joined the movement as well, using her poetry as an exile to further the cause.

Parnell's funeral became one of the biggest ceremonies for a poet in the United States — though it seems its grand nature was more because of her family's activism than for her poetry specifically. Actually, that ceremony was her second funeral; her first was much more low-key, and held at the home of her mother in New Jersey. After her brother had successfully blocked the repatriation of her body, he celebrated by throwing his sister a second funeral before her internment at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts.

The procession stopped in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston (at some points, the coffin was opened for viewings). Her casket was transported on a hearse pulled by six white horses, attended by 18 pallbearers. Irish flags intertwined with American flags were part of the propaganda, Irish-born poet/editor/activist John Boyle O'Reilly wrote about the event in tear-jerking detail. Her own role in the Irish nationalist movement involved little more than organizing women's groups, until it manifested in her poetry in her last two years. At that point, O'Reilly noted, "Her lyre would only respond to one breeze — nationality" (elsewhere, O'Reilly had belittled her poetry). Her poem "Post-Mortem" (sometimes listed as "After Death"):

Shall mine eyes behold thy glory, O my country?
     Shall mine eyes behold thy glory?
Or shall the darkness close around them, ere the sun-blaze
     Break at last upon thy story?

When the nations ope for thee their queenly circle,
     As a sweet new sister hail thee,
Shall these lips be sealed in callous death and silence
     That have known but to bewail thee?

Shall the ear be deaf that only loved thy praises
     When all men their tribute bring thee?
Shall the mouth be clay that sang thee in thy squalor
     When all poets' mouths shall sing thee?

Ah! the harpings and the salvos and the shoutings
     Of thy exiled sons returning
I should hear, though dead and mouldered, and the grave damps
     Should not chill my bosom's burning.

Ah ! the tramp of feet victorious! I should hear them
     'Mid the shamrocks and the mosses,
And my heart should toss within the shroud and quiver,
     As a captive dreamer tosses.

I should turn and rend the cere clothes round me,
     Giant-sinews I should borrow,
Crying, "O my brothers, I have also loved her,
     In her lowliness and sorrow.

"Let me join with you the jubilant procession,
     Let me chant with you her story;
Then contented I shall go back to the shamrocks,
     Now mine eyes have seen her glory."

Birth of Alice Ruth Moore

Alice Ruth Moore was born on July 19, 1875 in New Orleans; the city would later become the setting of many of her local color prose writings. In 1895, at age 20, she published her first book, Violets And Other Tales. The book included both prose and poetry. Writing, however, did not provide enough income and she took jobs as a teacher, stenographer, journalist, typist, and parole officer.

One of the most significant events in her life was her marriage to Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898, though the marriage was short (she left him in 1902) and unhappy. Even so, she continued using his name, even after her third marriage, when she became professionally known as Alice Dunbar Nelson.

From her first book, this poem is titled "If I Had Known":

  If I had known
Two years ago how drear this life should be,
And crowd upon itself all strangely sad,
Mayhap another song would burst from out my lips,
Overflowing with the happiness of future hopes;
Mayhap another throb than that of joy.
Have stirred my soul into its inmost depths,
           If I had known.

  If I had known,
Two years ago the impotence of love,
The vainness of a kiss, how barren a caress,
Mayhap my soul to higher things have soarn,
Nor clung to earthly loves and tender dreams,
But ever up aloft into the blue empyrean,
And there to master all the world of mind,
            If I had known.

Horton: because my skin is black

George Moses Horton was born enslaved in North Carolina in 1797. Living near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he practiced his poetry with students, who paid him for his recitations. He started publishing here and there, giving himself the nickname "the Colored Bard of North Carolina." One of his earliest published works was "Slavery," published in Freedom's Journal on July 18, 1828. It was attributed "by a Carolinian Slave named George Horton":

When first my bosom glowed with hope,
I gaz'd as from a mountain top
    On some delightful plain;
But oh! how transient was the scene—
It fled as though it had not been,
        And all my hopes were vain.

How oft this tantalizing blaze
Has led me through deception's maze;
        My friend became my foe—
Then like a plaintive dove I mourn'd,
To bitter all my sweets were turn'd,
        And tears began to flow.

Why was the dawning of my birth
Upon this vile accursed earth,
        Which is but pain to me?
Oh! that my soul had winged its flight,
When first I saw the morning light,
        To worlds of liberty!

 Come melting Pity from afar
And break this vast, enormous bar
        Between a wretch and thee;
Purchase a few short days of time,
And bid a vassal rise sublime
        On wings of liberty.

Is it because my skin is black,
That thou should'st be so dull and slack,
        And scorn to set me free?
Then let me hasten to the grave,
The only refuge for the slave,
        Who mourns for liberty.

The wicked case from trouble there;
No more I'd languish or despair—
        The weary there can rest.
Oppression's voice is heard no more,
Drudg'ry and pain, and toil ar o'er.
        Yes! there I shall be blest.

In the next year, Horton published The Hope of Liberty, making him the first black writer of the South. He is noted as the first enslaved person in the United States to protest his situation in verse. "Slavery," like all of his early works, was composed in Horton's head; he was not able to write until 1832. Apparently, Southern novelist Caroline Lee Hentz helped him write down these early verses for publication. When the President of UNC attempted to buy Horton's freedom, his enslaver would not allow it. However, Horton was allowed to keep any income he made from his poetry, averaging $3 a week in the 1830s. He was not granted his freedom until Union troops arrived on his enslaver's plantation after the Emancipation Proclamation.

*For more on Horton, see The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry (1997), edited by Joan R. Sherman. No images of Horton exist; the image above shows his signature, noting himself as "poet," from the David L. Swain papers at UNC.

Harte: a snug little cottage

The July 16, 1864 issue of the Californian included a short sketch by Bret Harte entitled "Fixing Up an Old House." The light-hearted tale depicts a new home-owner who begins fixing up his new cottage. His attempts at hanging wall-paper and painting the walls, however, nearly end in disaster and he resorts to hiring professionals.

Harte was among the first contributors to the Californian, writing at the behest of its founding editor Charles Henry Webb (though both were born New Yorkers). In the weekly journal, he often published satirical pieces which criticized California society. Webb and Harte both disliked the type of local color writing that was prevalent in the west at the time and, as such, the Californian did not include pioneer tales or frontier fiction. In fact, Harte's writings began to avoid common tropes of fiction entirely — a modern reader will find little content in "Fixing Up an Old House."

Still, the sketch includes the kind of straight-faced humor that made Harte so unique (this kind of smart humor also drew Mark Twain as a contributor to the publication). From "Fixing Up an Old House":

When I had secured the possession of my new home, and stood in its doorway, thoughtfully twirling the key in my hand, the words of the retiring tenant struck me with renewed intensity and vigor. "It's a snug little cottage," he had said, confidentially, "and a cheap rent — but it wants to be painted and papered bad." 'As I looked around it, I could not help thinking that one of these requirements had already been met — that it had been "papered bad," and that its present ragged, torn, and dirty walls looked better now than they must have looked in the primal horrors of their original paper. 

The narrator's initial thought is to do the clean-up work himself, though his wife suggested otherwise, implying not that they needed to save money, but that he had plenty of free time; the narrator is, in fact, a writer:

"You know that you're —" But she did not proceed any further in this feminine attempt to associate my literary habits with this branch of upholstering, and only said: "You might do it after office hours instead of writing, and you 'd save money by it."

Osgood: a pearl lies smiling and snowy

Frances Sargent Locke Osgood gave birth to her first daughter, Ellen Frances Osgood, on July 15, 1836. Ellen was born in England, where her mother and father (the painter Samuel Stillman Osgood) had moved shortly after their marriage. It was in that country that Fanny Osgood, as she was known, published her first book of poems, A Wreath of Flowers from New England. Included in that collection was a poem on "Ellen's First Tooth":

Your mouth is a rose-bud,
And in it a pearl
Lies smiling and snowy,
My own little girl!
Oh! pure pearl of promise!
It is thy first tooth—
How closely thou shuttest
The rose-bud, forsooth!

But let me peep in it.
The fair thing to view—
Nay! only a minute—
Dear Ellen! now do!
You wont? little miser,
To hide the gem so!
Some day you'll be wiser,
And show them, I know!
How dear is the pleasure—
My fears for thee past—
To know the white treasure
Has budded at last!
Fair child! may each hour
A rose-blossom be,
And hide in its flower
Some jewel for thee!

Also in the book was a  couplet, "Little Ellen's Pun":

She raised a box—(a baby of two years!)
And smiling, cried—"Shall Ellen box her ears?"

Many of Osgood's poems delve into the day to day life of mothers and wives. Perhaps because of this, she became one of the most popular women poets of the 1840s (of course, that she was first popular in England is always helpful for an American writer). Osgood, who was born in Boston 200 years ago this year, died of tuberculosis in 1850; she was 38 years old. Her two daughters, including Ellen, died within a year after their mother. A third, Fanny Fay, had died not long after her birth.

Dunbar: to be a worthy singer

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an intelligent young man in high school, where he was a member of the literary society, the debate team, and the school newspaper. As an adult, he took whatever job he could get to earn money, including a stint as an elevator operator. At age 23, however, he described his greater ambitions in a letter dated July 13, 1895:

Yes, I am tied down and have been by menial labor, and any escape from it so far has only been a brief respite that made a return to the drudgery doubly hard. But I am glad to say that for the past two or three years I have been able to keep my mother from the hard toil by which she raised and educated me. But it has been and is a struggle.

...I did once want to be a lawyer, but that ambition has long since died out before the all-absorbing desire to be a worthy singer of the songs of God and nature. To be able to interpret my own people through song and story, and to prove to the many that after all we are more human than African.

Dunbar had published his first poem when he was 16. By the time he wrote this letter, he had also published first book, Oak and Ivy (1893), though it did not earn him much money. He was giving sporadic readings in the hopes of earning extra cash and boosting his literary reputation. He hoped to attend college some day (he never did) and anticipated a trip around the country: "I have hoped year after year to be able to go to Washington, New York, Boston and Philadelphia where I might see our northern negro at his best, before seeing his brother in the South," he noted in his letter.

About a year later, a review by William Dean Howells would launch Dunbar into the national spotlight. His career, however, was cut short by his early death at the age of 33.

To fit our souls for hell or heaven

The Christian Recorder issue for July 12, 1888 included a short poem, "Memory," by Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman. It was her first published poem; the Illinois-born poet was 18 years old. She spent several years in South Dakota before attending college in Kentucky and Ohio. Very little is known about her life, though it is assumed she married a Reverend G. M. Tillman. Much of her work is highly religious and, as she once wrote, aimed "to the young women of [her] race."

Of all the powers that be in earth,
That fill the soul with joy or mirth
To memory's care it has been given
To fit our souls for hell or heaven.
Sometimes upon the mountain side
With God, foul sin will glide
Into our most holy place
And challenge Jehovah to his face.
The sinful echoes of a doubtful past
Rush o'er the mind and hold it fast.

But why art troubled, O my soul,
Since Jesus' touch has made thee whole?
Bid Memory waft to thee the story
Of thy great Saviour's wond'rous glory,
Tell thee sweetly, calmly, well,
How He saved thy soul from hell --
How when friendless, poor, alone,
Thou couldst nothing do but moan,
He revealed Himself to thee
Made the joyful, set thee free.

Mrs. Longfellow: so perfect a companion

After suffering through the night, Frances "Fanny" Appleton Longfellow died on July 10, 1861 after asking for a cup of coffee. She was 43 years old. The cause of death seemed to be shock after accidentally catching fire the day before. Her husband, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, had tried to save her life when he awoke from a nap. He covered her with a rug, which proved too small, and resorted to patting out the flames with his own body. His hands were severely injured in the process and, as he recovered, he missed her funeral (which was held on their 18th wedding anniversary). A friend wrote of Longfellow's absence:

I have not seen Longfellow. He has seen no one yet, out of his immediate family. I dread to think of him bereaved of Fanny: she was so perfect a companion of his daily existence, and sharer of his glory... God help them all. The world henceforth will be strangely changed for him.

The poet remained very private in his sorrows, though he was deeply grieved by his wife's sudden death. He became more sullen and rarely left his home in the following months. He stopped shaving, either out of disinterest or due to burn marks on his face. Biographers have found it frustrating that Longfellow did not allow his deep depression to mark what a contemporary called his "goody two-shoes" style of poetry. Nevertheless, 18 years to the day after his wife's death, Longfellow composed a sonnet he never intended to have published. "The Cross of Snow" is dated July 10, 1879:

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face — the face of one long dead —
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died, and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

Bicentennial of Fanny Fern

Sarah Payson Willis was born in Portland, Maine on July 9, 1811 to Nathaniel Willis and Hannah Parker Willis. Her father, an unofficial "deacon" at the Park Street Church in Boston, hoped to instill his daughter with piety by naming her after the Reverend Edward Payson. It did not work. Though educated well (even better than most girls), Sarah never seemed to fall in line with her father's religious beliefs.

Both her father and her brother Nathaniel Parker Willis were well-known and influential in literature and publishing — but did not financially support Sarah when she became destitute. No longer feeling like a member of the Willis family, with her first husband Charles Eldredge dead, and a divorce from her second husband Samuel Farrington pending, Sarah seemed to have lost her identity. As she turned to writing for income, she took the name Fanny Fern instead, beginning with the essay, "The Model Husband."

By the end of her life, Fern (she stopped using "Sarah" entirely) had published novels, short stories, and various essays. Among her works aimed at children was "The Policeman," which knocked down any expectations for happy birthdays.

...[Little Johnny] had beautiful presents, and a little sugared plumcake, made on purpose for him by his grandmother; and he was to have a little party in the evening, and ice cream and cake to eat; and they were to play blind man's buff, and all go to the circus in the evening...

Having just turned nine years old, he announces, "I want to be a policeman." At his age, however, it never occurred to him that an officer's job involved anything negative. Earlier, a policeman which had inspired little Johnny had heard the sobs of a little girl who, like Johnny, had turned nine years old that day.

He went into the room where the noise came from, and saw, not a birthday party, of warmly-dressed little children, and a bright fire, and pretty pictures on the walls, and such beautiful roses on the pretty carpet, that one almost hated to step on them. No, indeed! The floor was bare, and so were the walls; there was no bed in the room, no chairs, no tables; but on the floor lay a dead woman, and over her stood her own little girl, named Katy, only nine years old that very day... In her hand was a basket of cold victuals, that her mother had sent her out alone to beg; and there lay her mother, dead!

Though the officer was a stranger to young Katy, he offers to take her into his home and he and his wife raise her as their own daughter. This unsolicited act of kindness is severely contrasted with Fern's own life, when her own family refused to help her. Fern struggled for a time in boarding-houses, earning only a few dollars a week as a seamstress. Even when she turned to writing, her four to six articles a week earned her $6 to $20. What a relief it must have been when, years later, New York Ledger editor Robert Bonner paid her $100 a week.

O noble, true and pure and lovable

In 1893, James Whitcomb Riley was traveling on a lecture tour of the United States. At some point, he stopped at his childhood home where a photograph was taken (shown above). The incident may have reminded him of his mother, Elizabeth Marine Riley, who had died in 1870. She had taught him to read and write as a boy and encouraged his creativity. Whether or not she was the inspiration for the sonnet "To Elizabeth" is uncertain, but the poem is listed as an "obit" and dated July 8, 1893:

O noble, true and pure and lovable
As thine own blessed name, Elizabeth!—
Aye, even as its cadence lingereth
Upon the lips that speak it, so the spell
Of thy sweet memory shall ever dwell
As music in our hearts. Smiling at Death
As on some later guest that tarrieth,
Too gratefully o'erjoyed to say farewell,
Thou hast turned from us but a little space—
We miss thy presence but a little while,
Thy voice of sympathy, thy word of cheer,
The radiant glory of thine eyes and face,
The glad midsummer morning of thy smile,—
For still we feel and know that thou art here.

In 1915, an edition of Riley's collected works was called the "Elizabeth Marine Riley Edition." Only 150 were produced and each set included hand-colored watercolor illustrations. If she inspired this particular poem or not, Riley's work often refers to mothers or motherhood, as in "When Mother Combed My Hair," "A Boy's Mother," "Being His Mother," and several others.

Extravagant praise of Hope Leslie

On July 6, 1827, Catharine Maria Sedgwick wrote to her brother:

I hear from all quarters what honestly seems to me very extravagant praise of 'Hope Leslie.' I trust I shall not be elated by it. At present I certainly am not, for I feel too heavily oppressed, too firmly grappled to the earth to mount in the balloon of vanity.

Sedgwick had published Hope Leslie earlier that year, a novel set during the early European settlement of New England. The title character and her sister Faith had moved in with a relative named Fletcher after the death of their parents. Assigned to the Fletcher household was Magawisca, a teenage girl who had been captured from the Pequod tribe. When her father, the chief of the tribe, comes to rescue her, he also captures Everell Fletcher and Faith Leslie (hope's sister). Her father prepares to execute Everell by publicly chopping off his head, but Magawisca intervenes:

Everell bent forward and pressed his forehead to the rock The chief raised the deadly weapon, when Magawisca, springing from the precipitous side of the rock, screamed "Forbear!" and interposed her arm. It was too late. The blow was levelled—force and direction given; the stroke, aimed at Everell's neck, severed his defender's arm, and left him unharmed. The lopped, quivering member dropped over the precipice.

Everell escapes and, over the years, Faith integrates into the tribe and marries Magawisca's brother. When Magawisca is falsely accused of conspiring against whites, Everell and Hope Leslie help her escape.

The novel was the most widely-read of Sedgwick's works; the author, however, seemed disinterested by its success. When friends told her it would bring her fame, she wrote: fame—what is it? the breath of man." She prayed that she would "resist pride, vanity, egotism, self-complacency, and all those selfish propensities and emotions... May I remember that the talent... is the gift of God."

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

An excerpt from the speech by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852:

Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

...Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July!

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Sears: ten dim stars have turned to blood

How does one celebrate Independence Day when the country is in Civil War? Edmund Hamilton Sears (best known for a Christmas carol he wrote) answered the challenge in a poem meant to inspire the kind of unity that led to the creation of the country decades earlier. His poem "Song for July 4, 1861" references the states which have become the Confederacy, but notes that the love of the United States still exists and unity can come once again:

Still wave our streamer's glorious folds
    O'er all the brave and true,
Though ten dim stars have turned to blood
    On yonder field of blue.

It is our nation's judgment-day,
    That makes her stars to fall.
Lo! all the dead start from their graves
    At Freedom's trumpet-call.

And in the thunders of the storm
    She speaks, an angel strong:
"Now comes my reign of righteousness;
    Now ends the slavers' wrong.

Lift up your heads, ye faithful ones,
    For now your prayers prevail.
Ye faithless! hear the tramp of doom,
    And dread the iron hail!

God's last Messiah comes apace
    In Freedom's awful name,
And parts the tribes to right and left, —
    To glory or to shame."

Then wave the streamer's glorious folds
    O'er all the brave and true,
Till all its stars shine bright again
    On yonder field of blue.

Years later, the question would become, "How do you celebrate Independence Day after a Civil War?" That question was answered by Bayard Taylor (with Sidney Lanier) in 1876.

Lowell: Here, where we stand, stood he

Legend has it that, when George Washington first took command of the Continental Army in the early days of the American Revolution, he did so while standing under the shade of an elm tree on Cambridge Common in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He certainly did take command on July 3, 1775, but the question is not yet settled whether there was an elm tree involved or not.

That did not stop American writers from advocating the legend. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in a home that witnessed the event, just across from the Common. His poem "Under the Washington Elm" was written 80 years after the alleged event. 20 years after that, on the centennial of Washington's taking command, a large ceremony was held under the elm tree. The poet of the day was James Russell Lowell (whose own birthplace, though standing in 1775, was too far to have witnessed Washington; by coincidence, Lowell and Washington also share a birthday). From "Under the Old Elm," presented on July 3, 1875:

Words pass as wind, but where great deeds were done
A power abides transfused from sire to son:
The boy feels deeper meanings thrill his ear,
That tingling through his pulse life-long shall run,
With sure impulsion to keep honor clear,
When, pointing down, his father whispers, "Here,
Here, where we stand, stood he, the purely great,
Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere,
Then nameless, now a power and mixed with fate."
Historic town, thou holdest sacred dust,
Once known to men as pious, learned, just,
And one memorial pile that dares to last;
But Memory greets with reverential kiss
No spot in all thy circuit sweet as this,
Touched by that modest glory as it past,
O'er which yon elm hath piously displayed
These hundred years its monumental shade.

Lowell muses that there is no greater monument than a tree as it renews itself every spring. Its physical presence serves as a reminder of the event and connects the present to the past. Whether that event really happened or not, Lowell looks back in awe at Washington:

Beneath our consecrated elm
A century ago he stood...
Firmly erect, he towered above them all,
The incarnate discipline that was to free
With iron curb that armed democracy.

Lowell, who would become U.S. Minister to Spain two years later, wrote to a friend that he hoped poetry would reunite the country in the decade after the Civil War. Six members of Lowell's family were killed in Virginia during the Civil War and he noted to a friend that his poem was meant "to hold out a hand of kindly reconciliation to Virginia":

Virginia gave us this imperial man
Cast in the massive mould
Of those high-statured ages old
Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran;
She gave us this unblemished gentleman:
What shall we give her back but love and praise
As in the dear old unestranged days
Before the inevitable wrong began?

*For more on the Washington Elm legend, visit the Cambridge Historical Society or this post on Boston1775.com by historian J. L. Bell.

Griswold: purloining the fastest

The first issue of Brother Jonathan was published on July 1, 1839, edited by Parke Benjamin, and with a young Rufus Wilmot Griswold as his assistant. The New York-based publication came about three years before Griswold's anthology of American poetry made him one of the most famous critics in the country.

The Brother Jonathan was only four pages long — but they were very big pages. One friend wrote of it as "up-to-the-sky-to-be-lauded, biggest-of-all-possible-newspapers." They were lucky to take advantage of cheap postal rates at the time and, when they lost control of the newspaper to its publisher, they founded an identical publication called the New World. Oversized broadside newspapers became the rage, ushering a period dominated by "Mammoth Weeklies," as they were nicknamed.

More importantly, the editorial policies at these publications were to pirate previously-published works, including serialized works which had not yet published final installments. Further, Griswold and Benjamin published (read: "pirated") full-length novels in their pages and, under the name of "newspaper," they sold cheaper than actual books at 50 cents a copy, and enjoyed the cheap postal rates that came with the designation "newspaper." Competition drove prices even lower; some of the "Mammoth Weeklies" charged only 6 cents. Book publishers had to slash their own prices to keep up and, though the large format newspaper died out by mid-1844, the effect on the industry was long-lasting: previously, the average price of a new book was $2; it was now 50 cents.

Oddly, throughout it all, Griswold advocated the need for copyright law to prevent literary piracy. A contemporary editor said of Griswold, "He takes advantage of a state of things which he declares to be 'immoral, unjust and wicked,' and even while haranguing the loudest, is purloining the fastest."

*Note: The date for the first issue of Brother Jonathan comes from a biography of Griswold written decades after his death by his son William McCrillis Griswold (who barely knew his father). Much of the book is less than reliable.