Most welcome and most wholesome tears

A friend recommended to Oliver Wendell Holmes that he read the short story "The Bell of Saint Basil's." Moved by the story, he wrote a letter on May 31, 1891 to its author, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. "I may as well confess that the pathos of your story quite overcame me," he wrote. "I did not know I had so many tears in my emotional fountains... It did me good to have a good, long cry."

The story which left Dr. Holmes in tears follows an elderly couple from Virginia, Mr. and Mrs. Peyton, in the decades after the Civil War. Mr. Peyton serves as President of the fictitious Saint Basil's College, though the aftermath of the war has left him without students. Even so, he makes his way to the chapel every morning to ring the bells and offer a prayer to the empty pews:

Saint Basil's boys have gone beyond the urging voice of the chapel bell. Saint Basil cannot call her roll to-day... Saint Basil was, in short, a college without a boy. She had kept her ancient name, her distinguished President, her college buildings, her extended real estate, her chartered rights, and to some extent her invested endowments. What she had not kept was her students. Virginians spoke of the college as they do of the corn-fields, the mansions, the very chickens; nay, the moon in the heavens: "Oh, you ought to have seen it before the war!"

One day, however, Mr. Peyton discovers a man sitting in the final row. It was the revelation of that man's identity that moved Dr. Holmes. "I could not help writing on the spot, while the impression of your story was still tingling all through me," he wrote to Ward. "The ink on the first page of this note and the tears on my cheeks dried at the same moment. I thank you, then, for all these most welcome and most wholesome tears."

All o'er the tranquil land on this Memorial Day

Just as in 2011, May 30 was Memorial Day in 1881. A celebration for veterans in Boston included a reading of Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "Memorial Ode." Colonel Higginson was a veteran of the Civil War, having commanded the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (the first federally authorized black regiment). He describes a gathering of former soldiers:

...All o'er the tranquil land
   On this Memorial Day,
   Coming from near and far,
Men gather in the mimic guise of war.
   They bear no polished steel,
Yet by the elbow's touch they march, they wheel,
   Or side by side they stand.
They now are peaceful men, fair Order's sons;
But as they halt in motionless array,
   Or bow their heads to pray,
   Into their dream intrudes
The swift sharp crack of rifle-shots in woods;
   Into their memory swells
The trumpet's call, the screaming of the shells;
And ever and anon they seem to hear
The far-off thunder of besieging guns, —
All sounds of bygone war, all memories of the ear.

Thoughts of war, Higginson says, seem long past and he optimistically hopes that Peace (with a capital "P") has returned. It is honor of those "million men" who have laid down their arms that Memorial Day is celebrated with cooled blood an "no regretful tears." Though he invokes Massachusetts history for patriotic sentiment — in particular, he mentioned Paul Revere, Robert Gould Shaw, and Charles Sumner — Higginson notes we should not focus on the past but on the future:

They say our city's star begins to wane,
Our heroes pass away, our poets die,
Our passionate ardors mount no more so high.
'T is but an old alarm, the affright of wealth,
The cowardice of culture, wasted pain!
   Freedom is hope and health!
The sea on which yon ocean steamers ride
Is the same sea that rocked the shallops frail
Of the bold Pilgrims; yonder is its tide,
And here are we, their sons; it grows not pale,
Nor we who walk its borders. Never fear!
   Courage and truth are all!
Trust in the great hereafter, and whene'er
   In some high hour of need,
   That tests the heroic breed,
The Boston of the future sounds its call,
Bartletts and Lowells yet shall answer, " Here!"

Death of Webster: his work was done

When Noah Webster died on May 28, 1843, it was already accepted that his name would forever be remembered in the history of the written word in the United States. In the decades following his death, his Elementary Spelling Book sold more than a million copies a year. One publishing house installed a new steam-powered press specifically to increase its production rate of Webster's blue-backed speller to 525 copies per hour. Its influence was so profound that then-Senator (later President of the Confederacy) Jefferson Davis credited it as the book "above all books which [has] united us in the bond of a common language."

Webster had been a workaholic. In the month before his death, he had completed his book A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary, and Moral Subjects. His daughter was at hand when he died and, as she wrote to her husband: "All is over. Father, dear father, has gone to rest... He said his work was done, and he was ready." He was 85 years old.

After his death, his final work was published: a revised version of his An American Dictionary of the English Language (originally published in 1828). Earlier, in his preface to one of the spellers, Webster wrote:

In the progress of society and improvement, some gradual changes must be expected in a living language; and corresponding alterations in elementary books of instruction, become indispensable: but it is desirable that these alterations should be as few as possible, for they occasion uncertainty and inconvenience. And although perfect uniformity in speaking, is not probably attainable in any living language, yet it is to be wished, that the youth of our country may be, as little as possible, perplexed with various differing systems and standards. Whatever may be the difference of opinion, among individuals, respecting a few particular words, or the particular arrangement of a few classes of words, the general interest of education requires, that a disposition to multiply books and systems for teaching the language of the country, should not be indulged to an unlimited extent. On this disposition however, the public sentiment alone can impose restraint.

*Information in this post comes mostly from Joshua Kendall's recently-released biography The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture.

Bryant: a horror of illustrations

By 1854, William Cullen Bryant had been well-established as a poet for several decades. A publishing house in England offered to produce a complete collection of his poetry — with illustrations. A large illustrated book like this carried a high price tag, and Bryant worried it would not sell well. He wrote to his friend (fellow poet/editor) Richard Henry Dana on May 26, 1854:

As to my poems with illustrations; that is an idea of my bookseller. There is I suppose, a class of readers — at least of book-buyers, who like things of that kind; but the first thing which my bookseller... has promised to do, is to get out a neat edition of my poems in two volumes without illustrations. The illustrated edition is a subsequent affair, and though I have as great a horror of illustrations as you have, they will I hope hurt nobody. I am not even sure that I will look at them myself.

Included in the collection were many of Bryant's most famous poems. Many focus on nature and natural scenes, including "To the Fringed Gentian":

Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,
And colored with the heaven's own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night.

Thou comest not when violets lean
O'er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o'er the ground-bird's hidden nest,

Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue—blue—as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.

I would that thus, when I shall see
The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.

Upon its heights twin cities meet

After thirteen years of construction, the new bridge connecting New York City to Brooklyn was opened to the public on May 24, 1883. Among the first to use the Brooklyn Bridge, as it was named, was President Chester A. Arthur. As with many other New York landmarks, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge was celebrated by poets, including the New Hampshire-born Edna Dean Proctor, who had served as a governess in Brooklyn for a time.

A Granite cliff on either shore:
     A highway poised in air;
Above, the wheels of traffic roar;
     Below, the fleets sail fair; —
And in and out, forevermore.
The surging tides of ocean pour,
     And past the towers the white gulls soar,

And winds the sea-clouds bear,
     O peerless this majestic street,
This road that leaps the brine!
     Upon its heights twin cities meet,
And throng its grand incline, —
To east, to west, with swiftest feet.
Though ice may crash and billows beat,
Though blinding fogs the wave may greet
     Or golden summer shine.

Sail up the Bay with morning's beam,
     Or rocky Hellgate by, —
Its columns rise, its cables gleam,
     Great tents athwart the sky!
And lone it looms, august, supreme,
When, with the splendor of a dream,
Its blazing cressets gild the stream
     Till evening shadows fly.

By Nile stand proud the pyramids,
     But they were for the dead;
The awful gloom that joy forbids,
     The mourners' silent tread,
The crypt, the coffin's stony lids, —
Sad as a soul the maze that thrids
Of dark Amenti, ere it rids
     Its way of judgment dread.

This glorious arch, these climbing towers
     Are all for life and cheer!
Part of the New World's nobler dowers;
     Hint of millennial year
That comes apace, though evil lowers, —
When loftier aims and larger powers
Will mould and deck this earth of ours,
     And heaven at length bring near!

Unmoved its cliffs shall crown the shore;
     Its arch the chasm dare;
Its network hang the blue before,
     As gossamer in air;
While in and out, forevermore.
The surging tides of ocean pour,
And past its towers the white gulls soar
     And winds the sea-clouds bear!

Cranch and Fuller: the noblest woman of her time

On May 23, 1870, the New England Women's Club held an event in honor of Margaret Fuller. Fuller would have been 60 years old that day, if she hadn't died tragically two decades earlier. The featured speaker was fellow Transcendentalist and poet Christopher Pearse Cranch, who read his original poem "To the Memory of Margaret Fuller Ossoli." The massive poem was over 1,400 words long; here are a few snippets.

...One record rises from our past,
That shall forever last;
A name our age can never
From its remembrance sever.
We bear it in our hearts to-day,
Fresh as the perfume of the May.
It vibrates in the air, a rich, full-chorded strain
Touched with weird minor moods of pain,
The music of a life revealed to few,
Till to the age Death gave the fame long due,
And made the unfinished symphony a part
Of the great growing century's mind and heart.

But when I strive the music to rehearse,
How feebly rings my verse!
And why intone this melody of rhyme
For one, the noblest woman of her time,
Whose soul, a pure and radiant chrysolite,
Dims the superfluous arts our social forms invite?

Cranch notes that in her time, she was met with scorn by some. But Fuller, he writes, used her "wise intuition" to raise an "image of ideal womanhood." He references poetically her "Conversations" as well as who she was as a person:

...Her sweet persuasive voice we still can hear
Ruling her charmed circle like a queen;
While wit and fancy sparkled ever clear
Her graver moods between.
The pure perennial heat
Of youth's ideal love forever glowed
Through all her thoughts and words, and overflowed
The listeners round her seat.
So, like some fine-strung golden harp,
Tuned by many a twist and warp
Of discipline and patient toil,
And oft disheartening recoil, —-
Attuned to highest and to humblest use,—
All her large heroic nature
Grew to its harmonious stature.
Nor any allotted service did refuse,
While those around her but half understood
How wise she was, how good,
How nobly self-denying, as she tasked
Heart, mind, and strength for truth, nor nobler office asked.

Birth of Isaac McLellan

Isaac McLellan was born in what is now Portland, Maine on May 21, 1806, though his family moved to Boston while he was still a boy. After studying at Phillips Academy at Andover (with fellow Portland-born poet Nathaniel Parker Willis) then Bowdoin College (with fellow Portland-born poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), he attempted a career as a lawyer but was quickly pulled towards literature. He served as an associate editor for a magazine while contributing poems to various others. He spent equal time engaged in "sportsman" activities — bird-hunting, in particular. Eventually, McLellan published three books of poetry and moved to New York.

Most of McLellan's poems are nature-focused, many highlight the unique aspects of American culture: the frontier, Native Americans, and hunting for moose and bison. He set poems in the plains of Illinois, in the Wyoming territory, along the coast of Florida, and in parts of Canada. More exotic poems featured elephant hunts in Africa. Amid all of it, he often had a more philosophical message. From the opening stanzas of "Mount Auburn" (1843):

What is Life? — a bubble dancing
   On the sparkling fountain's brim,
Painted by the sunbeam glancing
   O'er its evanescent rim.
Soon its soft reflected glories,
   Images of colored skies,
Vanish — when the haze of evening
   O'er the panorama dies.
Life, with all its bliss and troubles,
Melts like unsubstantial bubbles!

What is life? — a little journey,
   Ending ere 't is well begun;
'Tis a gay disastrous tourney,
   Where a mingled tilt is ran;
And the head that wears a crown
   'Neath the meanest lance goes down.
Walk, then, on life's pathway, mortal!
   With a pure and steadfast heart;
So that through death's frowning portal,
Peacefully thou may'st depart!

Fern: Great Plans for the Future

At a time when most American newspapers left their articles anonymous, the Irish-born Robert Bonner sought out famous names for his New York Ledger — and paid top dollar to secure their contributions. The focus on well-known bylines helped make that paper popular: between 1851 and 1860, its circulation grew from 2,500 to 400,00 copies. Perhaps no name was more responsible for Bonner's success than the one he announced on May 19, 1855:

GREAT ATTRACTION!
NEW STORY FOR THE LEDGER
by FANNY FERN!
GREAT PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

The article beneath this headline explained that Fanny Fern, a recent sensation after publishing her scandalously personal novel Ruth Hall, would earn pay equal to "the highest price that has ever been paid by any newspaper publisher to any author." Bonner was not exaggerating. Fern (the pen name of Sara Payson Willis) had struggled as a freelance magazine writer and had decided to focus on books. Bonner offered her $25 per column. She refused. He offered her $50, then $75, before finally settling on $100 per column — indeed, the highest price ever paid for such a writer. Bonner justified the high price tag in his announcement by describing her as "the most popular authoress in this or in any other country."

Fern began serializing "Fanny Ford" a month later, ultimately earning her $1000. Rival newspaper the New York Evening Mirror commented, "We certainly do not know which to admire most, the ability and perseverance of the lady in making a reputation that commands such unheard-of remuneration for the labors of her pen, or the enterprise of the publisher who pays for it." Impressed by Bonner's dedication (and genuine interest in paying what authors were worth), Fern soon agreed to an exclusive contract. She held her role as columnist for the Ledger for the rest of her life (and slightly beyond).

*For the information in this post, I turned to Joyce Warren's Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (1992). Fern's bicentennial is coming up this summer; expect to read more about her here.

Dana: whether you are man or devil

BE IT REMEMBERED, That on the eighteenth day of May, in the forty-fifth year of the independence of the United States of America, WILEY & HALSTED, of the said district, have deposited in this office the title of a book, the right whereof they claim as proprietors, in the words following, to wit:

The Idle Man.

So read the fine print behind the title page of The Idle Man, a periodical copyrighted by Richard Henry Dana on May 18, 1821. The Massachusetts-born poet and critic (son of Francis Dana, a delegate to the Constitutional Congress and signer of the Articles of Confederation) was the sole author for the magazine. Dana founded it after leaving the North American Review, a conservative journal which he helped create but found it did not suit his critical tastes. In fact, Dana was a bit of a radical. For one, he dared suggest that Shakespeare was a better writer than Alexander Pope and promoted Romanticism at a time when others did not. By 1850, however, Dana's views were not only popular but standard. As he noted: "Much that was once held to be presumptuous novelty... [became] little better than commonplace."

The Idle Man lasted only one volume — long enough for Dana to publish Paul Felton, today considered the first Gothic novel in the United States (Dana's son later became more famous for his own prose writings). In the book, the title character is drawn to the woods near his new home after his marriage. Those woods soon threaten to destroy his sanity after he meets a mysterious boy there:

"Who and what are you?" cried he. "Come out and let me see whether you are man or devil." And out crawled a miserable boy, that seemed shrunk up with fear and famine. "Speak, and tell me who you are, and what you do here," said Paul. The poor fellow's jaws moved and quivered, but he did not utter a sound. His spare frame shook, and his knees knocked against each other, as in an ague fit. Paul looked at him for a moment... "What possess you? Why do you shudder so, and look so pale? Do you take the shadows of the trees for devils?"

"Don't speak of them. They'll be on me if you talk of them here," whispered the boy eagerly. Drops of sweat stood on his brow from the agony of terror he was in. As Paul looked at the lad, he felt something like fear creeping over him.

Dana and Riley: I do not like it at all

Critic (and former Brook Farmer) Charles Anderson Dana wrote to James Whitcomb Riley about "the great talent" in his poetry. He had accepted a couple of Riley's poems in previous issues of the New York Sun, including "Silence," but Dana's May 17, 1880 letter was not entirely positive. Dana roundly dismissed some of Riley's other submissions:

'The Wandering Jew' I return. It lacks both originality of imagination and finish of execution. 'Tom Johnson's Quit' I do not like at all. It has the radical defect of attempting to joke with a shocking subject.

"I was too profoundly impressed with my literary attainments," Riley later recalled. "I sent Dana blooming, wildwood verse. He pruned it and at first the pruning hurt, but afterward I saw the benefit." Riley was, after all, still struggling in his young career, and even resorted to gimmicks to get attention. Nevertheless, Riley took Dana's advice quite seriously and he later published a revised version of both rejected poems. "Tom Johnson's Quit," however, continued to joke about a shocking subject when it was published under the pseudonym John C. Walker. The poem is a satire of the temperance movement (ironic, considering Riley's own drinking problems), when townspeople hear the local drunk has given up alcohol:

Well, we was stumpt, an' tickled, too,—
  Because we knowed ef Tom hed signed
There wa'n't no man 'at wore the "blue"
  'At was more honester inclined:
An' then and there we kind o' riz,—
  The hull dern gang of us 'at bit—
An' th'owed our hats and let 'er whiz,—
      "Tom Johnson's quit!"

I've heerd 'em holler when the balls
  Was buzzin' 'round us wus'n bees,
An' when the ole flag on the walls
  Was flappin' o'er the enemy's,
I've heerd a-many a wild "hooray"
  'At made my heart git up an' git—
But Lord !—to hear 'em shout that way!—
      "Tom Johnson's quit!"

But when we saw the chap 'at fetched
  The news wa'n't jinin' in the cheer,
But stood there solemn-like, an' reched
  An' kind o' wiped away a tear,
We someway sort o' stilled ag'in,
  And listened—I kin hear him yit,
His voice a-wobblin' with his chin,—
      "Tom Johnson's quit—

"I hain't a-givin' you no game—
  I wisht I was! ... An hour ago,
This operator—what's his name—
  The one 'at works at night, you know?—
Went out to flag that Ten Express,
  And sees a man in front of hit
Th'ow up his hands an' stagger—yes,—
      Tom Johnson's quit!"

*The "blue ribbon" was used as a symbol by those who took temperance pledges. Recommended reading: James Whitcomb Riley: A Life (1999) by Elizabeth J. Van Allen.

Birth of L. Frank Baum

A boy born in Chittenango, New York on May 15, 1856 was given the first name "Lyman." He later dropped that appellation and referred to himself as "L. Frank Baum." Though his most famous book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was published in 1900, writing for children was not his original career path.

Baum was interested in acting, for one, but his literary interests started when he and his brother produced their own journal at home in their teen years. Then, in March 1880, he established a month periodical — The Poultry Record. The content was based in large part on competing journals in the trade, with the exception of Baum's editorial content. He sold the magazine within a few months but continued contributing a column, "The Poultry Yard." The journal's publisher, H. H. Stoddard, collected some of the popular musings into a book in 1886: The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs. This manual for fancy chicken breeders was, apparently, printed without L. Frank Baum's permission. It was, nevertheless, his first book.

A few years later, Baum moved with his young wife to what is now South Dakota (a landscape he translated into Kansas in his famous novel).  From his Book of Hamburgs:

For the first week, perhaps, nearly every old hen is faithful to her little brood, and guards them with that maternal tenderness for which she has been made the symbol of mother love. But this care soon wearies her, and in a few days she begins to neglect them, marching around in the chill and drenching rains of spring, and dragging her little brood after her through the damp grass, entirely oblivious of their sufferings; and one by one they drop off.

*For information in this post, I am indebted to L. Frank Baum: Creator Of Oz (2003) by Katharine M. Rogers.

Bret Harte: I am not an opera critic

Bret Harte became the editor of the San Francisco-based Californian shortly after its inception. For the weekly newspaper, he also contributed various sketches and reviews, including his essay "A Few Operatic Criticisms," published in the May 13, 1865 issue. In the humorous piece, Harte makes clear his background as an amateur:

I would state at the beginning of this article that I am not an opera critic, and do not wish to be confounded with any of those amiable gentlemen who write the regular notices, whose facile handling of musical terms always impresses me, and who, with their other varied talents seem to be gifted with a prescience with not unfrequently enables them to pen a fair description of a performance before it has taken place.

As an admitted non-expert, Harte observes while he criticizes. For instance, it seems to him that all baritones are always "unsuccessful at love," usually "jilted lovers, cruel parents or hated elder brothers."

Whatever his complaints, Harte later had some of his own writings adapted into opera forms. The Sicily-born Pietro Floridia, for example, produced La Colonia Libera in 1899 based on Harte's "M'Liss." The University of North Texas later premiered an opera version of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" by Judah Stampfer with music by Samuel Adler.

The Mississippi is well worth reading about

"Sold by subscription only," Life on the Mississippi was released on May 12, 1883. Its author, Mark Twain, had revised a series of articles published a few years earlier and combined them with new material gleaned from a recent trip along the Mississippi River. The original articles, written for The Atlantic Monthly at the request of its editor William Dean Howells, fictionalized the author's real life experience as a steamboat pilot. As the review in Harper's warned, however, the book lacks the "abounding strokes of whimsical humor that have tickled the fancy in other productions of this popular author" and instead presents an "amusing and interesting medley of fact and fiction."

Selling by subscription was a popular method which Twain used, believing that pre-orders were an indication of success. "The big sale," Twain wrote to publisher James R. Osgood a month before the book's release, "is always before issue... The orders that come in after the issue of a subscription book don't amount to a damn." He called his own prediction a "moral maxim," one which was "truer than nearly anything in the Bible." Osgood was less experienced with subscription sales and balked at Twain's suggestion that 100,000 should sell before its release. Twain was half-right: subscriptions were high, but it was later sales that made the book a best-seller by year's end.

Osgood and Twain had differing ideas about the book. Osgood hoped for a conventional travel narrative which would be easily accepted by the public. Twain, however, created something which remains unconventional and somewhat formless. The book opens:

The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world—four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin; it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope—a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.

*Significantly more information on this book can be found in Horst Hermann Kruse's Mark Twain and "Life on the Mississippi" (1982). Biographer Ron Powers gives the date of issue as May 17.

Whittier: In peace secure, in justice strong

The International Exhibition in Philadelphia was one of many events celebrating the centennial of the United States (two months later, Sidney Lanier and Bayard Taylor presented a Cantata and poem, respectively). The opening event, however, was held on May 10, 1876 and included the singing of an original hymn by New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Like Lanier and Taylor, Whittier emphasized the unity of the country and the progress of freedom in the decade after the Civil War. His "Centennial Hymn":

Our fathers' God! from out whose hand
The centuries fall like grains of sand,
We meet to-day, united, free,
And loyal to our land and Thee,
To thank Thee for the era done,
And trust Thee for the opening one.

Here, where of old, by Thy design,
The fathers spake that word of Thine
Whose echo is the glad refrain
Of rended bolt and falling chain,
To grace our festal time, from all
The zones of earth our guests we call.

Be with us while the New World greets
The Old World thronging all its streets,
Unveiling all the triumphs won
By art or toil beneath the sun;
And unto common good ordain
This rivalship of hand and brain.

Thou, who hast here in concord furled
The war flags of a gathered world,
Beneath our Western skies fulfil
The Orient's mission of good-will,
And, freighted with love's Golden Fleece,
Send back its Argonauts of peace.

For art and labor met in truce,
For beauty made the bride of use,
We thank Thee; but, withal, we crave
The austere virtues strong to save,
The honor proof to place or gold,
The manhood never bought nor sold!

Oh make Thou us, through centuries long,
In peace secure, in justice strong;
Around our gift of freedom draw
The safeguards of thy righteous law:
And, cast in some diviner mould,
Let the new cycle shame the old!

Death of Higginson

In addition to being an author, he also had been a soldier, a critic, and an editor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson never stopped writing, right up to his death on May 9, 1911 . Though ill, he traveled to Europe and throughout the east coast of the United States in the decade before his death. For his funeral, an honor guard comprised of black men led him to his final resting place at Cambridge Cemetery. Decades earlier, during the Civil War, Colonel Higginson had led a regiment of black soldiers (the basis of his book Army Life In a Black Regiment).

At the ceremony, a hymn was sung based on one which Higginson had written at the age of 22:

To Thine eternal arms, O God,
Take us, Thine erring children, in:
From dangerous paths too boldly trod,
From wandering thoughts and dreams of sin.

Those arms were round our childish ways,
A guard through helpless years to be;
Oh leave not our maturer days,
We still are helpless without Thee!

We trusted hope and pride and strength:
Our strength proved false, our pride was vain,
Our dreams have faded all at length, —
We come to Thee, O Lord, again!

A guide to trembling steps yet be!
Give us of Thine eternal powers!
So shall our paths all lead to Thee,
And life smile on like childhood's hours.

A new story by Mrs. H. B. Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe alerted the editor of the National Era, Gamaliel Bailey, that her new story would "extend three or four numbers" but it would "be ready in two to three weeks." In fact, Stowe's project turned to be a much bigger undertaking and she missed her own deadline. The headline on May 8, 1851, seemed simple enough: "A New Story by Mrs. Stowe." The body of the article promised "the publication of a new story by Mrs. H. B. Stowe, the title of which will be, 'UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, OR THE MAN THAT WAS A THING'." Bailey warned his readers not to "neglect to renew their subscriptions."

In the process of writing the serialized novel, Stowe knew she would be writing something far longer than her previous work. The idea first came to her in a vision: one Sunday morning at church in Brunswick, Maine, she saw the image of an enslaved man being beaten by two others at the orders of a white master. As she wrote:

My vocation is simply that of a painter, and my object will be to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible Slavery, its reverses, changes, and the negro character, which I have had ample opportunities for studying.

Throughout a cold winter, she wrote (sometimes skipping meals) in her home at Bowdoin College. She told her husband she would show "the capabilities of liberated blacks to take care of themselves" — a topic over which she soon obsessed. Even when she traveled, she continued working on her novel, sometimes moved to tears by her own scenes. The project grew and grew and the author ultimately changed its subtitle to "Life Among the Lowly." What was originally a four-part sketch became a 40-part novel. Its first section was not published the first week after Bailey's announcement but about a month later, on June 5. It continued weekly until April 1 of the next year. In book form, it became the highest-selling novel of the 19th century.

Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard: I like devils

She was born Elizabeth Drew Barstow in Massachusetts on May 6, 1823, but she later became Mrs. Richard Henry Stoddard in 1852 and thereafter lived in New York. Her husband was a well-known and respected critic, but Mrs. Stoddard held her own as a poet and novelist (coincidentally, her father's shipyard built the Acushnet). Mrs. Stoddard published her first story in the Atlantic in 1861; her novel, The Morgesons, was published a year later.

The novel follows Cassandra, a young woman from New England, as she searches for her place in the world. Oppressed by family and society, she attempts to break free from the expectations of domesticity and her role as a woman. "Cassandra, that man is a devil," a friend warns in one scene. "I like devils," she responds.

Recent scholars have tried to reclaim The Morgesons as an important step in women's literature. At the time of publication, it was unnoticed or dismissed. It did, however, elicit from Henry James what Alfred Habegger called "the most ferocious, in fact vicious, review Henry James is known to have written":

[The Morgesons] possessed not even the slightest mechanical coherency. It was a long tedious record of incoherent dialogue between persons irresponsible in their sayings and doings even to the verge of insanity. Of narrative, of exposition, of statement, there was not a page in the book... [The reader] arose with his head full of impressions as lively as they were disagreeable.

*Information from this post was gleaned in part from Henry James and the 'Woman Business' (2004) by Alfred Habegger.

Birth of Hovey: Off with the fetters

Though born in Normal, Illinois on May 4, 1864, Richard Hovey grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. Educated at home by his mother, Hovey published his first book, Poems, when he was 16 in 1880; he entered Dartmouth College the next year. His many friendships there — including ones he built while a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity — deeply influenced him and his later writings are heavily focused on comradeship. After failed attempts at acting and joining the seminary, Hovey returned to poetry, his early calling. His work has been described as Walt Whitman-esque. From "Vagabondia" (1894):

Off with the fetters
That chafe and restrain!
Off with the chain!
Here Art and Letters,
Music and wine,
And Myrtle and Wanda,
The winsome witches,
Blithely combine.
Here are true riches,
Here is Golconda,
Here are the Indies,
Here we are free—
Free as the wind is,
Free as the sea,
Free!

Houp-la!

...Here we are free
To be good or bad,
San or mad,
Merry or grim
As the mood may be—

Free as the whim
Of a spook on a spree,—
Free to be oddities,
Not mere commodities.
Stupid and salable,
Wholly available,
Ranged upon shelves;
Each with his puny form
In the same uniform,
Cramped and disabled;
We are not labelled,
We are ourselves...

Miller: the love of the beautiful

With a few books already under his belt, Joaquin Miller made his way to Europe as a celebrated poet. He was received especially well by the English artist/post Dante Gabriel Rossetti in London. Miller wrote in his diary on May 3, 1871:

I find here among the Pre-Raphaelites one prevailing idea, one delight—the love of the beautiful. It is in the air. At least I find it wherever the atmosphere of the Rossettis penetrates, and that seems to be in every work of art—beautiful art. I am to dine with Dante Rossetti! ...I shall listen well, for this love of the beautiful is my old love—my old lesson. I have read it by the light of the stars, under the pines, or away down by the strange light on the sea, even on the peaks of the Pacific—everywhere. Strange that it should be so in the air here. And they all seem intoxicated with it, as with something new, the fragrance of a new flower that has only now blossomed after years of waiting.

Miller had first met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother William Rossetti a few months earlier, but it was this dinner that he considered the most importance experience he had while overseas. He even wrote about it at length months later once back in the United States. Certainly, Miller attracted their attention, and that of many throughout England: though born in Indiana, he wanted to embody the image of a quintessential Californian. To that end, he crafted a Western look complete with oversized cowboy hat, red flannel shirt, spurred boots, a blue polka-dotted bandanna and, occasionally, chaps over his pants.

Though the Rossettis turned down the opportunity to have Songs of the Sierras dedicated to them, William later called it "a truly remarkable book" with "picturesque things picturesquely put." From that book's poem "The Californian":

Afar the bright Sierras lie
A swaying line of snowy white,
A fringe of heaven hung in sight
Against the blue base of the sky.

I look along each gaping gorge,
I hear a thousand sounding strokes
Like giants rending giant oaks,
Or brawny vulcan at his forge;
I see pick-axes flash and shine
And great wheels whirling in a mine.
Here winds a thick and yellow thread.
A moss'd and silver stream instead;
And trout that leap'd its rippled tide
Have turn'd upon their sides and died.

Bread that nourished the brain and the heart

Writing to a friend on May 2, 1848, Henry David Thoreau theorized what humanity needs to sustain itself:

"We must have our bread." But what is our bread? Is it baker's bread? Methinks it should be very home-made bread... Man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow... I have tasted but little bread in my life... Of bread that nourished the brain and the heart, scarcely any.

Bread, Thoreau says, varies based on the person: a laborer and a scholar sustain themselves on different types of bread. In the letter, he also tells his friend he has moved:

I do not write this time at my hut in the woods. I am at present living with Mrs. [Lidian] Emerson, whose house is an old home of mine, for company during Mr. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson's absence.

Thoreau first moved into Bush, as the Emerson family called the home, in 1841. There, he served as a handyman and companion to the Emerson children. After his two years at Walden Pond, as early as September 1847, he moved back and stayed through July 1848 (with the exception of that night he spent in jail). During that period, Ralph Waldo Emerson toured through Europe, mostly England, Scotland, and Ireland. Thoreau and Lidian Emerson built a particularly close friendship during this time. While in Europe, Mr. Emerson wrote to his friend Thoreau: "It is a pity that you should not see this England, with its indescribable material superiorities of every kind." Upon his return, Thoreau found Emerson a changed man and soon their friendship dissolved. Thoreau referred to their friendship as a cherished flower, "till one day my friend treated it as a weed."

*This letter is collected in Letters to a Spiritual Seeker (2005) edited by Bradley P. Dean. See also The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau (1995).