A Hallowe'en Party: awfully degraded

Caroline Ticknor, the granddaughter of Boston publisher William Davis Ticknor, published several works in her lifetime, including biographies of other writers. One collection of short stories published in 1896 included the tale "The Hallowe'en Party."

The humorous sketch follows a character named J. Turner Dodge, a well-to-do New Yorker transplanted to a less cosmopolitan locale. Trying to fit into the high society scene there, he happily accepts an invitation to a Halloween party, wearing a brand new expensive suit. To his surprise, however, this party is not a formal dinner, but a series of games. By the end of the tale, Dodge has become soaked from bobbing for apples, covered in flour from a game, bumped his knees from falling down stairs, ingested thick black smoke from incorrectly cooked chestnuts, and accidentally swallowed a button intended as a prize hidden in a cake. The next day his friend greets him, excited to hear about the experience:

"How was the party?" he called out; "anything like what you have in New York?"

"No, thank heaven," Dodge responded, " we may be awfully degraded there, but we have n't fallen quite so low yet."

The next year, when Dodge is invited to his second Halloween party, he concocts a prior engagement. "I shall always remember my first Hallowe'en party," Dodge admits. His friend tries to persuade him, noting that most people like these types of parties:

"Well, then, I have n't been educated up to Hallowe'en parties. There are some tastes that can't be acquired, you know; you must be born with them, like the love of Boston baked beans."

"Oh, you 're too New Yorky for anything; don't you know that these jolly informal things are twice as much fun?"

"Yes; but I'm satisfied with half as much fun; you can have my other half."

Death of Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ella Wheeler Wilcox died of cancer on October 30, 1919. She was just a few days shy of her 69th birthday. Born in Wisconsin, she is today recognized for one poem (and its quotable first line or two), but wrote much more. Her interest in writing was sparked, in part, by a need to support her family; she was first published in her teen years.

Towards the end of her life, particularly after the death of her husband, Wilcox had become particularly interested in spiritualism and communicating with her dead husband. Throughout her life, however, she wrote poems which frequently delved into questions of death. This one, "Sleep and Death," was published in 1900:

When Sleep drops down beside my Love and me,
Although she wears the countenance of a friend,
A jealous foe we prove her in the end.
In separate barques far out on dreamland's sea,
She lures our wedded souls. Wild winds blow free,
And drift us wide apart by tides that tend
Tow'rd unknown worlds. Not once our strange ways blend
Through the long night, while Sleep looks on in glee.

O Death! be kinder than thy sister seems,
When at thy call we journey forth some day,
Through that mysterious and unatlased strait,
To lands more distant than the land of dreams;
Close, close together let our spirits stay,
Or else, with one swift stroke annihilate!

Birth of Mathews: Man of the Future!

Perhaps no man who was once so influential is now so forgotten as Cornelius Mathews, born October 28, 1817 in Port Jefferson, New York. He was a journalist, an editor, a poet, a novelist, and a leading member of the Young America movement centered in New York. Perhaps his greatest claim to contemporary fame, however, was his demand for a distinctly American identity, one which could be reflected in literature, as a break-away from Old World ties.

To Mathews, the major problems of the day were the lack of international copyright and the wholesale piracy of foreign books. Stifling the American author financially, he said, would also ruin American creativity. Yet, a focus on books would doom an American to "the tranquility of a sure, though not always a speedy, oblivion." All authors ("any hand that has ever raised a pen"), Mathews hopes, will understand that the problems of literature in America are worth solving, however, and he urges writers to continue writing: "Let whoever can speak and write go on, in the stout heart and hopeful spirit, writing and uttering what Nature teaches. He will not, even in so great a din, be altogether unheard." From his poem, "The Reformer":

Man of the Future! on the eager headland standing,
  Gazing far off into the outer sea,
Thine eye, the darkness and the billows rough commanding,
  Beholds a shore, bright as the Heaven itself may be;
    Where temples, cities, homes and haunts of men,
  Orchards and fields spread out in orderly array,
    Invite the yearning soul to thither flee,
And there to spend in boundless peace its happier day...

But, the reformer is sudden borne "by passion" and "earnest thought" to a place where earth and heaven meet. There, he learns his new duty: to deliver the truth to his fellow men. But first, he must "seize by its horns the shaggy Past," and cast its carcass into the abyss. Even despite this violent image, Mathews warns, the truth will come slowly. As such, the reformer is told not to beat down "the 'stablished bulwarks" but allow kindness to soften the transition.

Wake not at midnight and proclaim the day,
When lightning only flashes o'er the way:
Pauses and starts and strivings towards an end,
Are not a birth, although a god's birth they portend.
  Be patient therefore like the old broad earth
    That bears the guilty up, and through the night
    Conducts them gently to the dawning light—
Thy silent hours shall have as great a birth!

O life, and light, and gladness

Maria White was 32 years old when she died of tuberculosis on October 27, 1853. In her short life, she outlived three of her children, who all died in infancy. Her doting husband James Russell Lowell, whom she married in 1844, was devastated by her death. Just before she was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, her coffin was opened so that her daughter Mabel could take one final look.

Shortly after, the still grieving husband oversaw the publication of a posthumous edition of White's poetry. Its 50 copies were privately distributed, though they ensured that her work survived long enough that a new edition was republished in 1907. No doubt Lowell would have further suffered editing this book, especially when preparing her poem "The Sick-Room" (White had suffered for years before her death):

A spirit is treading the earth,
     As wind treads the vibrating string;
I know thy feet so beautiful,
     Thy punctual feet, O Spring!

They slide from far-off mountains,
     As slides the untouched snow;
They move over deepening meadows,
     As vague cloud-shadows blow.

Thou wilt not enter the chamber,
     The door stands open in vain;
Thou art pluming the wands of cherry
     To lattice the window pane.

Thou flushest the sunken orchard
     With the lift of thy rosy wing;
The peach will not part with her sunrise
     Though great noon-bells should ring.

O life, and light, and gladness,
     Tumultuous everywhere!
O pain and benumbing sadness,
     That brood in the heavy air!

Here the fire alone is busy,
     And wastes, like the fever's heat,
The wood that enshrined past summers,
     Past summers as bounteous as fleet.

The beautiful hanging gardens
     That rocked in the morning wind,
And sheltered a dream of Faery,
     And life so timid and kind,

The shady choir of the bobolink,
     The race-course of squirrels gay, —
They are changed into trembling smoke-wreaths,
     And a heap of ashes gray.

Moulton: as from a passing cloud

Louise Chandler Moulton was uneasy as she sailed back to the United States from Europe in 1891. Just before leaving, she had received a telegram informing her of her mother's illness. As she sailed, she remarked on the lovely weather, but noted, "I am so anxious as to what news of my poor mother awaits me." Sure enough, upon landing, she learned that her mother died on October 26, 1891 (she is pictured here in healthier times). Moulton had missed the funeral as well. As she recorded in her journal: "Oh, what it is to know that I shall never see her again!"

Moulton herself died only 27 years later. Her mother figured more than once in her poetry. One poem is called "My Mother's Picture":

How shall I here her placid picture paint
   With touch that shall be delicate, yet sure?
   Soft hair above a brow so high and pure
Years have not soiled it with an earthly taint,
Needing no aureole to prove her saint;
   Firm mind that no temptation could allure;
   Soul strong to do, heart stronger to endure;
And calm, sweet lips, that utter no complaint.

So have I seen her, in my darkest days
   And when her own most sacred ties were riven,
Walk tranquilly in self-denying ways,
   Asking for strength, and sure it would be given;
Filling her life with lowly prayer, high praise, —
   So shall I see her, if we meet in heaven.

Another poem, "A Dream in the Night," is subtitled "To My Mother," and more expressly addresses her dead mother:

Sometimes it seems thy face —thy long-hid face —
   Looks out on me as from a passing cloud,
   Till I forget they clad thee in thy shroud,
And laid thee sleeping in thy far-off place —
So once again the tender, healing grace
   Of thy dear presence is to me allowed.
   Wilt thou not bless the head before thee bowed?
Wilt not thy voice thrill through the empty space?

How lone and cold the world without thee seemed!
   Regaining thee, how warm it is and bright!
      Yet all in vain to reach thee do I seek: —
And then I wake to know I have but dreamed,
   And thou art silent as the silent night —
      With tears I call thee, yet thou dost not speak.

Boker on Zagonyi: a cheer for thee!

Though George Henry Boker never personally took up arms during the American Civil War, he used his poetry as an active chronicler of war (and as pro-Union propaganda). One of his books, published in 1864, is entirely made up of war poems. An early poem in that book, "Zagonyi," is dated October 25, 1861. It recounts the event of that date (illustrated above) when a Hungarian-born Union officer named Charles Zagonyi led a charge against Confederate soldiers during the Battle of Springfield, Missouri:

Captain of the Body-Guard,
   I 'll troll a stave to thee !
My voice is somewhat harsh and hard,
   And rough my minstrelsy.
I've cheered until my throat is sore
For how Dupont at Beaufort bore;
   Yet here 's a cheer for thee!

I hear thy jingling spurs and reins,
   Thy sabre at thy knee;
The blood runs lighter through my veins,
   As I before me see
Thy hundred men with thrusts and blows
Ride down a thousand stubborn foes,
   The foremost led by thee.

With pistol snap and rifle crack —
   Mere salvos fired to honor thee —
Ye plunge, and stamp, and shoot, and hack
   The way your swords make free;
Then back again, — the path is wide
This time, — ye gods! it was a ride,
   The ride they took with thee!

No guardsman of the whole command
   Halts, quails, or turns to flee;
With bloody spur and steady hand
   They gallop where they see
Thy daring plume stream out ahead
O'er flying, wounded, dying, dead ;
   They can but follow thee.

So, Captain of the Body-Guard,
   I pledge a health to thee!
I hope to see thy shoulders starred,
   My Paladin; and we
Shall laugh at fortune in the fray,
Whene'er you lead your well-known way
   To death or victory!

Chopin: the voice and the dream

Though best known as the author of the feminist novel The Awakening, Kate Chopin wrote many other works. The Louisiana writer, perhaps most surprisingly, also wrote several poems. One, "By the Meadow Gate," is dated October 24, 1898, and slyly questions the expected roles of male/female:

Over the hill and across the ford and down by the meadow gate
A girl is asleep in the long, cool grass.
The soft winds blow and the soft winds pass;
The birds call: "awake!" but they do not stay
While the maid is dreaming the time away
           By the meadow gate

Over the hill and across the ford and down by the meadow gate
A youth with the light of the boundless skies
A glow in his soul and a flame in his eyes,
Follows a voice that is never still,
Trading the path to the distant hill
           By the meadow gate

Over the hill and across the ford and down by the meadow gate
The voice and the dream are near — so near,
That if he but listened his heart might hear.
Now he may follow the years and afar,
He may walk from the world to the evening star
           Past the meadow gate.

Over the hill and across the ford and down by the meadow gate
May her days be many, her days be few,
The dream of the maiden will never come true.
For the soft wind carried the moment away,
And the birds they sang, but they would not stay
           By the meadow gate.

Death of Mayne Reid: garden of God

Though born in Ireland to Scottish parents in 1818, Thomas Mayne Reid moved to New Orleans at the age of 21. In his first two years in the United States, Reid lived and worked in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi before moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to begin his literary career. Before the end of the 1840s, he had also lived and worked in Philadelphia, New York, Rhode Island, and served as a soldier during the Mexican-American War. When he died on October 22, 1883, he was in London, England. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery.

Captain Mayne Reid, as he was often known, was the author of scores of poems, novels, and short stories. He also used the pseudonym "The Poor Scholar" for some of his journalistic writings. Many of his works feature exotic locales and dangerous adventures undertaken by fearless males. Critics and readers alike remarked on the inherent manliness in his writing. As one obituary noted: "When his sword was in his sheath, and his fingers held the pen, he wrote with a vigour and impetuosity as if under fire."

According to his widow Elizabeth, Reid's headstone was carved with a sword crossed by a pen as well as an anchor — a design she ordered personally. It was also inscribed with an a simple quote from the first chapter of his book The Scalp-Hunters:

This is the "weed prairie." It is misnamed. It is the garden of God.

Reid's casket was adorned by a wreath ordered by the United States Consul in London. About the same time, a family friend named Caroline Ollivant quickly wrote a tribute poem:

A warrior has gone home,
   A mighty spirit fled!
Hush'd is the magic tone—
   A noble man is dead.

Oh, boys of England, mourn!
   Ye well may grieve and weep,
As to the grave is borne
   This hero, gone to sleep.

No more his wondrous pen
   Can thrill you with delight;
He may not come again
   To wreathe fresh spells as bright.

His kindly heart is stilled;
   Imagination's fire
For us is quenched and chilled,
   And seemeth to expire.

But no! Beyond the veil
   Of this dim, shrouding clay
His brightest powers can never fail,
   And there—he lives to-day!

Then, dear Mayne Reid, farewell!
   Thou'st gained a happier shore,
Where we, too, hope to dwell,
   When earth's tide flows no more.

Thou'st fallen at thy guns,
   Thy keen lance is laid by;
But in the hearts of England's sons
   Thy name shall never die!

Lucy Stone: one of the anointed few

Lucy Stone was a well-known and respected abolitionist and suffragist. She became the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree and kept her maiden name after she her marriage. As a public speaker and organizer, she was a constant advocate for civil rights throughout her life. She died in 1893 at the age of 75.

Stone's funeral was held on October 21, 1893. She had asked that her funeral be "simple and cheerful" but her wishes were undermined by the throng of admirers that came to pay their respects. Among her dozen pallbearers (six men and six women) was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Her husband and supporter Henry Browne Blackwell had written to another champion of civil rights (especially for women), Julia Ward Howe: "what shall I do without her?" Howe memorialized Stone in a poem, "Lucy Stone":

Full of honors and of years,
   Lies our friend at rest,
Passing from earth's hopes and fears
   To the ever Blest.

One of the anointed few
   Touched with special grace
For a life whose service true
   Should redeem the race.

Where is that persuasive tone
   Welcome in our ears?
Still I hear it, sounding on,
   Through the golden spheres.

When we raise our battle cry
   For the holy Right,
We shall feel her drawing nigh
   With a spirit's might.

As the veil of flesh doth part,
   We behold her rise,
Crowned with majesty of heart:
   There true queendom lies.

Harte: a gloomy spectacle of myself

As he recorded in his journal entry for October 19, 1857, Bret Harte "commenced school" in Uniontown, California. The young Harte had only recently published his first mature poem. Now faced with difficulty finding work, was hired by the wealthy Charles Liscomb to tutor his two teenage sons.

The New York-born Harte tutored the boys nearly every day (except Sunday) from about 8:30 in the morning until shortly after noon. The topics of the day included reading and writing, arithmetic, and geography. Outside the classroom, Harte apparently kept to himself; at least one local thought him "quite a snob" because of it. In fact, Harte was quite unhappy. That winter, he wrote:

What the d——l am I to do with myself — the simplest pleasure fail to please me — my melancholy and gloomy forboding stick to me closer than a brother. I cannot enjoy myself rationally like others but am forced to make a gloomy spectacle of myself to gods and men.

This period in Harte's life was quite formulaic: tutoring during the day, poor attempts at hunting in the afternoon, sermons on Sundays (which he described as often "trite" or "vapid"). He meticulously recorded the lackluster details in his journal for five months. Harte stuck out in the frontier community of Uniontown; one neighbor wrote he "did not mix very well with the rougher element which formed a great part of the population." He was, by many accounts, the best dressed in town and once refused an offer from Liscomb to go hunting on a Sunday (as "a matter of conscience"). The same month he began tutoring, however, his first prose work was published.

By March of the next year, Harte stopped tutoring the Liscomb boys. In the decade which followed, he became more established as a writer, journalist, and poet. By the 1870s, he had moved to Europe.

Stedman: Ring! ring the bells

On October 18, 1859, the New York Tribune published a poem that nearly cost Edmund Clarence Stedman his life. Only a few days earlier, the wealthy Cuban landowner Don Esteban Santa Cruz de Oviedo married the 18-year old Frances Amelia Bartlett, nearly four decades his junior. The lavish ceremony was held in New York, and the young bride was showered with jewelry and other gifts. In the days leading up to the great event, the media began to call it "The Diamond Wedding."

Within a day and a half of the wedding, Stedman wrote a 218-line satirical poem he named "The Diamond Wedding." The struggling poet admitted that, at the time, he was "at that happy period of obscurity," and expected the "piece of trash" would either never get published or not draw attention if it did. Upon its publication in the New York Tribune, however, it was a local sensation. Stedman's name was not withheld and it was reprinted as early as a few hours later in the evening paper. This stanza comes about halfway through:

Ring! ring the bells, and bring
The people to see the marrying!
Let the gaunt and hungry and ragged poor
Throng round the great cathedral door,
To wonder what all the hubbub's for,
    And sometimes stupidly wonder
At so much sunshine and brightness which
Fall from the church upon the rich,
    While the poor get all the thunder.

The wealthy and influential family of the new Mrs. Oviedo had been annoyed by the press coverage of the wedding. As one newspaper put it, Stedman's poem was the straw that broke the camel's back. When her father (a former Navy lieutenant/captain named Washington A. Bartlett) expressed his rage, Stedman did not deny he wrote the poem. Captain Bartlett called it a "gross libel" full of "licentious allusions." Stedman's immediate response was to defend the humor of the poem; he refused the apology demanded of him. A duel was threatened and, for a time, Stedman sincerely feared for his life. The threat was never carried out.

Only a few years later, during the Civil War, Stedman and Bartlett crossed paths. Stedman now admitted it was his "careless pen" that led to the poem. Bartlett noted that "in a time of public grief, private differences may well be forgotten." And so was "The Diamond Wedding," though it forever remained Stedman's most (in)famous poem.

Lanier: melodious unities

The public library in Macon, Georgia unveiled a bust to their native poet/musician Sidney Lanier on October 17, 1890. The bust was a copy of and complement to another which was installed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where Lanier had spent his last working years. The original bust was created by Ephraim Keyser, who did not accept payment for the work.

Lanier had died nine years earlier at the age of 39. In his short career, had inspired many including various other writers. Lanier saw the connection between poetry and music and allowed the concepts of both to intertwine in his work. He also believed that these art forms could help heal the nation in the years after the Civil War.

The bust's unveiling in Georgia, naturally, was celebrated with poetry. One of the poets who presented for the occasion was William Hamilton Hayne (son of poet Paul Hamilton Hayne). His "Poem for the Unveiling of the Bust of Sidney Lanier, October 17, 1890":

Unveil the noble brow, the deep-souled eyes,
Wherein melodious unities
   Of Music and of Poetry were born,
   For undeterred by care's half sluggish thorn—
Barbed oft with suffering—he bravely brought
To Song's full bloom his Lyric buds of thought.

Here love and homage shall alike proclaim
The undying whiteness of our poet's fame;
Wed to the marble, yet exempt from the cold
As winter clouds blessed by the sun's warm gold.

                    And now I hear
                    Far off yet clear
                Two voices that are one—
             For drawing close to Music's feet
             'Tis thus her Lyric sister sweet
                Sings of their cherished son!

Strong-winged and free each mood of me
   Thrilled through his heart and brain,—
His soul was lit by lights that flit
   Across the waving grain!
The marshes drear he made a prayer
   With words whose wondrous flight
Bore thoughts that reach, through rhythmic speech,
   To sunlands out of sight!

He let no seed from Doubt's dark weed
   Fall in the holy shrine
Where song was bred, by music led
   To beckoning heights divine!
And seldom mute his silver flute
   Invoked with matchless art
Each wave of sound by Silence bound
   Within her vestal heart!

Death's arctic fear—"a cordial rare"
   To his enraptured dream,—
Came from the blue his spirit knew
   Of love and faith supreme!
His "Sunrise" song, with rapture strong,
   Rose like a lark in light
Who feels the sway of sovereign Day
   Reign o'er the mists of night!

He loved the flow of winds that blow
   To "odor-currents" set,—
The gem-like hue of fleeting dew,
   Frail rose and violet,—
The soul in trees whose litanies
   His reverent spirit heard;
The corn-blades rife with vernal life,
   The rune of bee or bird!

Strong-winged and free each mood of me
   Thrilled through his heart and brain,—
His soul was lit by lights that flit
   Across the waving grain.
The marshes drear he made a prayer
   With words, whose wondrous flight
Bore thoughts that reach, through rhythmic speech,
   To sunlands out of sight!

*The image included here is an early photograph of the original bust at Johns Hopkins University. It was copied for the public library at Macon.

Riley: sailing off, with never word at all

The "Hoosier Poet" James Whitcomb Riley had such difficulty getting published in his early career that he turned to gimmicks. Eventually, his first book was published by a friend named George C. Hitt, business manager of the Indianapolis Journal. When Hitt and his family set sail for Europe on October 15, 1890, Riley wrote a poem titled "The Whitheraways" for the family (he references each member of the family):

The Whitheraways!—That's what I'll have to call
You—sailing off, with never word at all
Of parting!—sailing 'way across the sea,
With never one good-bye to me—to Me!

Sailing away from me, with no farewell!—
Ah, Parker Hitt and sister Muriel—
And Rodney, too, and little Laurance—all
Sailing away—just as the leaves, this Fall!

Well, then, I too shall sail on cheerily
As now you all go sailing o'er the sea:
I've other little friends with me on shore—
Though they but make me yearn for you the more!

And so, sometime, dear little friends afar,
When this faint voice shall reach you, and you are
All just a little homesick, you must be
As brave as I am now, and think of me!

Or, haply, if your eyes, as mine, droop low,
And would be humored with a tear or so,—
Go to your Parents, Children! let them do
The crying—'twill be easier for them to!

King: Twain is not nearly so nice as Mr. Clemens

The Louisiana-born Grace King recognized that Samuel Clemens and "Mark Twain" were, in a way, two different people. On October 14, 1887, she wrote a letter to a friend about her experience with the man. She once saw an English clergyman who "was busy showing off before 'Mark Twain,' & Mark Twain, who is not nearly so nice as Mr. Clemens, was showing off for him." King wrote that what she witnessed was "a cross firing of anecdotes, some of which I had heard too often to enjoy much."

King was able to see both the good and bad aspects of Clemens/Twain. She was critical, for example, of his money-worshiping vision of the future of America. In her journal for 1887, she recorded:

He said that in a hundred years from now America would be leading the world — in art, letters, science, and politics. Our population would be so great that we would be the market — the customers of the world's intellectual commerce. We therefore would set the fashions, regulate the taste.

American opinion, according to Clemens/Twain, would have a cash value. In fact, he predicted that money would be the main inspiration and reward for all ventures. He ignored any higher or spiritual aims, she wrote, concluding that, "He seems to have made a slave of his soul... making it a physical impossibility to see the world above." Elsewhere, she noted how she and Clemens were walking one Sunday, a day he called "the most horrible, detestable day that ever was invented." She welcomed his humor at the time.

The other side of Clemens/Twain, she admitted, was more pleasant. "He is an easy man to get along with socially," she recorded a year later. "He does not impose his opinions, at least on me he did not — and he listens — at least to me — with attention." Dismissing the label "egotist," she concluded he was "the entertainer, I may say, the entertainment."

*For the information in this post, I turned to Grace King: A Southern Destiny (1983) by Robert Bush.

Irving: unwilling to shackle myself

On October 12, 1828, Washington Irving noted in his journal that he received a letter from English publisher John Murray: "[He] offers 1,000£ a year to conduct a monthly magazine, and to pay liberally besides for any original articles I may insert; offers one hundred guineas an article for contributions to the Quarterly Review."

To the latter, Irving roundly refused, noting to his older brother Peter Irving that the Review "has always been so hostile to our country, I cannot draw a pen in its service." But Irving was certainly intrigued by Murray's offer, noting elsewhere the details of the deal. The magazine Murray proposed would be exclusively focused on literature and the arts, without the usual mix of politics thrown in.

"I have declined," Irving wrote a few days later to a friend, "as I do not wish to engage in any undertaking that would oblige me to fix my residence out of America; and, indeed, I am unwilling to shackle myself with any periodical labour."

Between his comments about the Quarterly Review's attacks on American writing, and his expressed desire to fix his residence in the United States, Irving had abandoned his country for a time. In fact, he lived in Europe for 17 years straight (it was during this period that Murray contacted him). He did not buy Sunnyside, his home in the United States until 1835. Reluctantly, by 1839, he also became a regular contributor to a periodical, despite his aversion to it, when he started working with The Knickerbocker (a magazine named in his honor).

Dunbar: it means a regular income

"I have landed the position at Washington," wrote Paul Laurence Dunbar to a friend on October 11, 1897. "It is a small one, but it means a regular income, the which I have always so much wanted." Dunbar had been appointed to a job in the Reading Room at the Library of Congress. The income that so excited him was $720 per year.

The Dayton, Ohio-born Dunbar had secured the job through the help and influence of a friend. Throughout his life, he had worked a series of odd jobs (including elevator operator), eking out a living while also writing both poetry and prose.

Yet, as early as 23 years old, he complained about "menial labor" and harbored an "all-absorbing desire" to be a writer. His first widely-circulated poem was published when he was 16. True to his word, he gave up on his job in the Reading Room after only a year and three months. The official record at the Library of Congress gives his reasoning "to give full time to his literary work." Though Dunbar lived a short life, he did live long enough to see his reputation as a writer blossom. Dunbar's poem "One Life":

Oh, I am hurt to death, my Love;
   The shafts of Fate have pierced my striving heart,
And I am sick and weary of
   The endless pain and smart.
My soul is weary of the strife,
And chafes at life, and chafes at life.

Time mocks me with fair promises;
   A blooming future grows a barren past,
Like rain my fair full-blossomed trees
   Unburdened in the blast.
The harvest fails on grain and tree,
Nor comes to me, nor comes to me.

The stream that bears my hopes abreast
   Turns ever from my way its pregnant tide.
My laden boat, torn from its rest,
   Drifts to the other side.
So all my hopes are set astray,
And drift away, and drift away.

The lark sings to me at the morn,
   And near me wings her skyward-soaring flight;
But pleasure dies as soon as born,
   The owl takes up the night,
And night seems long and doubly dark;
I miss the lark, I miss the lark.

Let others labor as they may,
   I'll sing and sigh alone, and write my line.
Their fate is theirs, or grave or gay,
   And mine shall still be mine.
I know the world holds joy and glee,
But not for me,—'tis not for me.

Cranch: one living spirit blending all

"The Evening Primrose," a poem by writer/artist Christopher Pearse Cranch, is dated October 10, 1872. The poem refers to the oenothera, a yellow flowering plant which opens nearly instantaneously in the evening. Certainly, the poem is influenced by the poet's Transcendentalist leanings but, further, it reminds the reader to find beauty where he/she can:

"What are you looking at?" the farmer said;
   "That's nothing but a yellow flowering weed."
We turned, and saw our neighbor's grizzled head
   Above the fence, but took of him no heed.

There stood the simple man, and wondered much
   At us, who wondered at the twilight flowers
Bursting to life, as if a spirit's touch
   Awoke their slumbering souls to answer ours.

"It grows all o'er the island, wild," said he;
   "There are plenty in my field: I root 'em out.
But, for my life, it puzzles me to see
   What you make such a wonderment about."

The good man turned and to his supper went;
   While, kneeling on the grass with mute delight
Or whispered words, around the plant we bent,
   To watch the opening buds that love the night.

Slowly the rosy dusk of eve departed,
   And one by one the pale stars bloomed on high;
And one by one each folded calyx started,
   And bared its golden petals to the sky.

One throb from star to flower seemed pulsing through
   The night, — one living spirit blending all
In beauty and in mystery ever new, —
   One harmony divine through great and small.

E'en our plain neighbor, as he sips his tea,
   I doubt not, through his window feels the sky
Of evening bring a sweet and tender plea
   That links him even to dreamers such as I.

So through the symbol-alphabet that glows
   Through all creation, higher still and higher
The spirit builds its faith, and ever grows
   Beyond the rude form of its first desire.

O boundless Beauty and Beneficence!
   O deathless Soul that breathest in the weeds
And in a starlit sky! — e'en through the rents
   Of accident thou serv'st all human needs;

Nor stoopest idly to our petty cares;
   Nor knowest great or small, since folded in
By universal Love, all being shares
   The life that ever shall be or hath been.

Birth of Stedman: we are somewhat pleased

Edmund Clarence Stedman was born on October 8, 1833 in Hartford, Connecticut. His father reported the birth to a family member of "a fine Stout Boy, & you must know that we are somewhat pleased... [I] pray that he may be a blessing to his parents." His father reported that the boy was remarkably quiet and sedate, he rarely cried (or smiled, for that matter). One of his nurses predicted if he lived to adulthood, he would not be an ordinary man. About two years later, the boy's father went to sea to alleviate an illness. He never returned.

Young Stedman did grow to be an extraordinary man. He lived a varied life as a poet, critic, advocate of copyright law, and influential voice in the world of American letters. Yet, he often struggled financially. He assumed that he would inherit a substantial sum of money on his 21st birthday but a newer will from his grandfather was found.

Stedman often used his birthday as a test of his progress from year to year. In 1864, for example, he noted: "My thirty-first birthday. Since October 8, 1863, I have published my second volume, made $10,000, which came like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land... It has been the happiest year of my toilsome, turbulent manhood." By his 37th birthday in 1870, however, Stedman was despondent:

[I] have passed the fatal — to poets — 37th year, and begin to think I am no poet: only a poor, gray haired, unsuccessful dreamer, trying to get fat by feeding on the wind. Am as poor as on my 20th birthday... O, how poor, and how precarious the future! And how my genius, whatever it may be, is cramped, warped, and gradually atrophying away.

In fact, Stedman had turned away from a life of literature and put it aside as a hobby. His new career was on Wall Street. On his birthday in 1866, he reopened a brokerage business, concluding "Am now obliged to leave Art again and take up the Muck Rake." Ultimately, he worked on Wall Street for some 35 years.

Timrod: whispers round the body of the dead

The Charleston Mercury's October 7, 1861 issue included the poem "I Know Not Why" (also published as "Sonnet IX") by South Carolina-born poet Henry Timrod:

I know not why, but all this weary day,
Suggested by no definite grief or pain,
Sad fancies have been flitting through my brain:
Now it has been a vessel losing way
Rounding a stormy headland; now a gray
Dull waste of clouds above a wintry main;
And then a banner drooping in the rain,
And meadows beaten into bloody clay.
Strolling at random with this shadowy woe
At heart, I chanced to wander hither! Lo!
A league of desolate marsh-land, with its lush,
Hot grasses in a noisome, tide-left bed,
And faint, warm airs, that rustle in the hush
Like whispers round the body of the dead!

After teaching in other towns, Timrod returned to his native Charleston when the Civil War broke out. He became the unofficial Poet Laureate of the Confederacy, and wrote many war-related poems. The war imagery in the sonnet above is unmistakeable. Timrod served in the Confederate army for only a short time due to chronic illness and, less than a year after this poem, he became a war correspondent on behalf of the Charleston Mercury, inspired by the bloody encounter at Shiloh. Again, his service was short-lived. By the end of the war, his family was left impoverished, despite his fame.

Birth of Gibson: a series of after-thoughts

At least one historian has put William Hamilton Gibson at the highest rank among people who have inspired a love of nature (alongside Henry David Thoreau). Born in Sandy Hook, Connecticut on October 5, 1850, Gibson became a naturalist, an illustrator, and an author (sometimes combining all three interests). His background as a New Englander certainly helped; he once wrote, "Yes, I am New England to the core. No other place on earth will ever be so near and dear or carry me to loftier mountain tops." His long lineage in that particular of the country stretched out and connected him to Ellery Channing, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. One of his ancestors was fictionalized in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale "Grandfather's Chair."

In 1882, Gibson published a book titled Pastoral Days, Or Memories of a New England Year. He divided the book (or "The Cycle," as he called it) into four chapters named after the four seasons. His chapter, "Summer," included his view of his home town Sandy Hook (disguised as "Hometown"):

The old homestead is situated in the heart of Hometown, fronting on the main street. The house itself is a series of after-thoughts, wing after wing, gable after gable having clustered around the old nucleus as the growth of new generations necessitated new accommodation. Its outward aspect is rather modern, but the interior with its broad open fireplace and accessories in the shape of crane and firedogs, is rich with all the features of typical New England.

"God's Miracle" by Gibson

In the book, the author serving as narrator returns to this "sanctuary [where] my footsteps first lead me." Entering through the great white front door, he climbs its creaky steps to the garret above. It has become a place of decay and sadness, "shrouded in a weird gloom" with "an air of melancholy mystery." From this garret, he looks out:

Looking through the dingy window between the maple boughs, my eye extends over lawn and shrubberies, three acres in extent — a little park, overrun with paths in every direction, through ancient orchard and embowered dells, while far beyond are glimpses of the wooded knolls and winding brook, and meadows dotted with waving willows, and farther still the ample undulating farm.

Howells: very slowly and reluctantly

"I am working very hard at my story here, which takes shape very slowly and reluctantly," William Dean Howells wrote to Henry James on October 4, 1882 from France. "I shall never again, I hope, attempt to finish a thing so long thrown aside."

The story in question, A Woman's Reason, would be published the next year, though it was started four years before Howells wrote this note. In another letter around this period, he admitted, "I have had such a good time that I have been unable to do so much even as kill a consumptive girl, or make a lover homesick enough to start home from China and get wrecked on an atoll in the South Pacific." Dining out "four times a week" and traveling through Europe was making him too happy.

Howells, who was hailed then and now as a master of literary realism, took an odd turn in A Woman's Reason — one which critics noticed. In A Woman's Reason, a well-born woman named Helen Harkness loses access to an inheritance when her father dies bankrupt. Helen is saved when her fiancé, long thought dead, returns from a shipwreck. As he references in his letter to James, Howells kept the story at sea for too long. He spends 80 pages describing the character's shipwreck and the adventure which followed.

"After promising to give us sound realistic work," one critic complained, Howells "has descended to the function of producing lollipops." James warned his friend away from "factitious glosses." Howells, in turn, admitted to Mark Twain that A Woman's Reason bore "the fatal marks of haste and distraction." Modern scholar Elsa Nettels noted the shipwreck scene was "the most palpable example in Howells's work of the kind of contrivance he deplored in romantic novels."

*Much of the information from this post comes from Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (1997), edited by Michael Anesko. I also consulted Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America (1988) by Elsa Nettels.

Timothy Thomas Fortune: clime of my birth

Born enslaved in Florida on October 3, 1856, Timothy Thomas and his family later added the last name "Fortune" after emancipation. T. Thomas Fortune, as he called himself, took a series of jobs, including a political page, post office worker, printer's devil, and teacher. Throughout, he was always afflicted with what he called "the book learning fever." Self-educated for most of his life, Fortune eventually attended Howard University and became a journalist.

Fortune became an advocate of civil rights, working closely with Booker T. Washington and others as a ghost writer and speech writer. He published scholarly works like Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics (1885) and The Negro in Politics (1895). In 1905, he published a book of poems, Dreams of Life. The book includes several romantic poems, nature poems, and poems dedicated to famous figures (including Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe); many are sonnets. This one is "The Clime of My Birth":

Oh, take me again to the clime of my birth,
The dearest, the fairest, to me on the earth,
The clime where the roses are sweetest that bloom,
And nature is bathed in the rarest perfume!

Where the songs of the birds awake us at morn
With a thrill of delight and pleasure new born;
For the mocking bird there is loudest in hymn,
With notes ever changing, none fettering him.

When the hills of the North are shrouded in snow,
When the winds of Winter their fiercest do blow—
Then take me again to the clime of my birth,
Dear Florida—dearest to me on the earth.

*For background on this post, I consulted African American Lives (2004), edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham.

Chopin: the reproach of being a cabin

It was on this date on October 1, 2008, that the former home of writer Kate Chopin burned down. The Cloutierveille, Louisiana house, which had become the Bayou Folk Museum, was a total loss.

The structure was built in the first few years of the 19th century but it was not until 1879 it was purchased by Kate Chopin's husband Oscar. After her husband's death, Chopin moved out in 1884 and settled in the city of her birth, St. Louis, where she began her writing career in earnest.

In the small town, over 250 miles from New Orleans, Kate Chopin entertained many visitors who adored her sociability and intellect. She spent her days going for walks and riding horses. She fictionalized the town in her short story, "For Marse Chouchoute":

They lived quite at the end of this little French village, which was simply two long rows of very old frame houses, facing each other closely across a dusty roadway.

Their home was a cottage, so small and so humble that it just escaped the reproach of being a cabin.

For those of us who see the importance of a sense of place in literary studies, the story of the fire that destroyed Chopin's home is devastating. That it was so recent only makes the wound feel that much fresher. For another picture of the ruins, see here. More information  on the fire, including a response from Chopin's descendants, is available at the Kate Chopin International Society page.