Death of Hovey: end his night of woe

Richard Hovey died in a New York hospital on February 24, 1900, at the age of 35. Born in Normal, Illinois in 1864, he grew up mostly in Washington, D.C., then enrolled at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he graduated in 1885. Hovey was an ambitious student, editing two student publications, giving the commencement oration, being elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and writing a version of the school song.

Even so, Hovey struggled to find a career. He abandoned both acting and the ministry before returning to his earlier hobby of writing. According to some accounts, he looked the part of a writer: flamboyantly dressed with a velvet jacket and flowing silk tie. Some have called him an American attempt at Oscar Wilde. His first books of, as they called it, "vagabond" poetry, were co-written with Canadian poet Bliss Carman. Other books by Hovey included dramatic updates of Arthurian legends.

After his death, his wife Henriette Hovey edited a final book, To the End of the Trail (1908), which included, with one exception, poems which had never been published in Hovey's lifetime, as well as a substantial number of translations from, among others, French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Perhaps for his death an earlier poem would make for more appropriate reading: his poem "Dead" is dated 1890, for example. But for now, instead, here is "World and Poet" (1892):

"Sing to us, Poet, for our hearts are broken;
Sing us a song of happy, happy love,
Sing of the joy that words leave all unspoken, —
The lilt and laughter of life, oh sing thereof I
Oh, sing of life, for we are sick and dying;
Oh, sing of joy, for all our joy is dead;
Oh, sing of laughter, for we know but sighing;
Oh, sing of kissing, for we kill instead!"
How should he sing of happy love, I pray,
Who drank love's cup of anguish long ago?
How should he sing of life and joy and day,
Who whispers Death to end his night of woe?
    And yet the Poet took his lyre and sang,
    Till all the dales with happy echoes rang.

At the time of his death, Hovey was being treated for testicular cancer. After surgery, he apparently suffered a heart attack. He was buried with his mother's family in North Andover, Massachusetts.

W. T. Field: noble thoughts and high ideals

Walter Taylor Field was born in Illinois on February 21, 1861. He was educated in both Chicago public schools and at an academy in Iowa before attending Dartmouth and Amherst College in New England. Returning to Illinois, he became an author and poet before compiling history books and anthologies for children.

In his book Fingerposts to Children's Reading, 1907, Field offered several essays with advice for children's reading. He advocated that children read to develop their character, particularly their moral character, as well as for cultural enrichment. He gave suggestions to parents on encouraging reading, as well as tips for teachers, and anyone else interested in educated the young. As he wrote in the preface, "No one who knows and loves children can fail to appreciate the influence which noble thoughts and high ideals exercise upon the unfolding character, — and no one who knows good literature can fail to realize the wealth of joy and beauty which it holds in store for the young."

Reading, Field wrote, allows children to build their imagination and to find heroes to imitate. For that reason, he discourages reading about crime or cheap stories that offer "action and excitement" without moral lessons: "Carefully planned details of robberies and hold-ups instruct the youth how to go about the nefarious business, and inspire a wish to emulate the robbers, because they are bold and daring and always outwith the police." Instead, he offered a list of recommended reading for home libraries, public schools, public libraries, and Sunday schools.

Also, in the early 20th century, Field teamed up with the former superintendent of Chicago's public schools, Ella Flagg Young, to produce a series of age appropriate compilations called The Young and Field Literary Readers (not unlike the McGuffey Readers). In their "advanced' book, they included many American authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Sidney Lanier. They also included the writings of historians, political figures, and public speakers, including Edward Everett, William Hickling Prescott, Francis Parkman, and Henry Clay. Other volumes included fairy tales, Native American legends, and fables from all over the world (including, impressively, Hindu fables).

Field was also, occasionally, a poet himself. His poem "January":

The dawn comes late and cold and brings no cheer;
   Blue shadows lie across the driven snow;
   Dim skies shut down upon the world below,
Save in the east, where ruddy lines appear,
Piercing the purple cloud-banks like a spear.
   Adown the road creaking wagons go;
   The teamsters beat their breasts to keep aglow;
Their frosty breath floats upward, keen and clear.

As thus I watch the coming of the day
   And think of summer suns and waving grain,
The Master Artist, at my side alway,
   Sketches with frosty pencil on the pane
Leaves, ferns and nodding flowers, as He would say,
   "Take heart, and wait. All these shall come again."

Death of Douglass: We still live

Orator, statesman, reformer, editor, and author Frederick Douglass died unexpectedly on February 20, 1895 at his home in Washington, D.C. called Cedar Hill. He was about 77 or 78 years old. A former slave, he secretly learned how to read, but remained headstrong and independent — qualities which his enslaver attempted to break him of. After one particular whipping, a teenaged Douglass fought back. He was never beaten again.

After escaping from enslavement (with the help of several, including David Ruggles), Douglass made his way north and met with his free black wife. Now on free land, Douglass reflected, "I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life." He became an outspoken advocate for abolition and was recognized as one of the most powerful speakers of the day. He wrote his life story in three autobiographies, the last of which was revised and reissued only three years before his death. In that book, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, reiterated his history of enslavement and his escape to freedom but also explained his more recent life story. For example, years after the Civil War, he was granted a government post, U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia, making him the first African American to receive a federal post that required approval from the Senate.

In those years, however, many black Americans felt a disconnect with Douglass, who had entered a life of privilege that some believed did not reflect the black American experience. Further, he had married a white woman after the death of his first wife, a decision that met with disapproval even from his loving family. He had shifted his interest to women's rights and women's suffrage (the day of his death, he attended a rally for the cause alongside Susan B. Anthony). Douglass did not agree. He knew that more work was necessary, even after Emancipation - and, more than that, it was not white people who would continue the progress of black people, but black people themselves. As he wrote in his final autobiography:

Taking all the circumstances into consideration, the colored people have no reason to despair. We still live, and while there is life there is hope. The fact that we have endured wrongs and hardships which would have destroyed any other race, and have increased in numbers and public consideration, ought to strengthen our faith in ourselves and our future. Let us, then, wherever we are, whether at the North or at the South, resolutely struggle on in the belief that there is a better day coming, and that we, by patience, industry, uprightness, and economy may hasten that better day. I will not listen, myself, and I would not have you listen to the nonsense, that no people can succeed in life among a people by whom they nave been despised and oppressed...
Greatness does not come to any people on flowers beds of ease. We must fight to win the prize. No people to whom liberty is given, can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant. The hardships and the dangers involved in the struggle give strength and toughness to the character, and enable it to stand firm in storm as well as in sunshine.

Stowe: what sort of woman I am!

"So you want to know what sort of woman I am!" wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe with obvious surprise. The letter, dated from Andover, Massachusetts, on February 16, 1853, was written in response to that request and Stowe happily complied. She described herself as, "To begin with... I am a little bit of a woman, — somewhat more than forty, about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days, and looking like a used-up article now."

Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had been published in book form slightly less than a year earlier. Considering the recipient of Stowe's letter was a stranger to her, she was quite open, describing that Uncle Tom's Cabin was inspired in part by her own poor state and "awful scenes and bitter sorrows" of her own life, including the "peculiar bitterness" and "almost cruel suffering" of the death of one of her children. She was equally forthcoming about her poverty, even noting she did not own enough teacups for a family visit to her home. "But then I was abundantly enriched with wealth of another sort," she wrote. Her first payments from publishing stories, she said, was used to purchase a feather-bed, "the most profitable investment" she could think of at the time — she compared it to the philosopher's stone.

Now, Stowe noted, she was working on a follow-up to her novel: "It will contain all the facts and documents on which that story was founded, and an immense body of facts, reports of trials, legal documents, and testimony of people now living South, which will more than confirm every statement in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'..." The book, which would be published later that year as A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, was causing her difficulty because of the subject matter. "This horror, this nightmare abomination!" she wrote of slavery, "can it be in my country? It lies like lead on my heart, it shadows my life with sorrow."

Stowe's letter was addressed to Eliza Lee Follen, herself a published author, which may explain why Stowe was so forthcoming about personal details. She admitted to having felt already acquainted since her girlhood, having made "daily use of your poems for children." In fact, years ago, Stowe had considered writing to Follen to introduce herself and thank her for her work. In her first book, published 1839, Follen included an anti-slavery poem, "Remember the Slave," which Stowe almost certainly admired:

Mother, whene'er around your child
      You clasp your arms in love;
And when, with grateful joy, you raise
      Your eyes to God above, —

Think of the negro mother, when
      Her child is torn away,
Sold for a little slave — O, then,
      For that poor mother pray...

Ye Christians! ministers of Him
      Who came to make men free,

When, at the Almighty Maker’s throne
      You bend the suppliant knee,—

From the deep fountains of your soul
      Then let your prayers ascend

For the poor slave, who hardly knows
      That God is still his friend.

Let all who know that God is just,
      That Jesus came to save,

Unite in the most holy cause
      Of the forsaken slave.

Douglass: where the light comes

"It was a meeting long to be remembered," concluded William Cooper Nell in a letter to a colleague. The letter, dated February 15, 1848, described an anti-slavery speech given by Frederick Douglass in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In the "mere sketch," Nell emphasized that, "New Bedford has a widely spread fame as an Anti-Slavery town." The inhabitants of that town of 16,000 had actively helped gain sympathy for the cause, in part because the population included "twelve hundred colored people," 75% of which had come from enslavement. Douglass was one of them for a time.

After running away from enslavement, Douglass temporarily settled in New Bedford (and it was here that he chose his last name). Returning to New Bedford that February, he particularly noted the corruption of the federal government which had just annexed Texas, which he believed was a ploy to enhance slave power in the Senate, not to mention "the spirit of conquest that possesses the American heart," as Nell reported. In his speech, Douglass also broke down the views of Senator Henry Clay, who had been favoring colonization. This plan to remove free blacks and send them to Africa was an injustice, Douglass said. Nell quoted Douglass:

It [e.g. the colonization plan] is our deadly enemy, we shall not obey its wishes, but shall do that which Mr. Clay 'wishes' us not to do; we shall stay here in our country, identified with the slave, laboring to obtain our rights and his, and we shall secure them... The hand of Providence is with, and guides us; crush us to the earth, and we rise again; try to starve us, and we grow strong and vigorous; close up your hearts, legislate against us, and try to make us hate the land of our birth, and we love it the more. You may try to keep us low, ignorant and in the dark; but the light is shining all around; to it, though slowly, yet surely will come... Slavery cannot exist where the light comes.

Nell imagined what it would be like if Douglass and Clay had a public debate over the question in Washington, D.C. "What a spectacle!" he imagined, "A negro, and recently a slave, debating with the 'Demosthenes of the nation.'"

Nell's letter was published several days later in the North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper founded by Douglass and Nell in New York. At the end of it, he reiterated their shared belief that the press would help their cause, and that those who supported the North Star were supporting abolitionism. Douglass's speech, he reported, resulted in 20 new subscribers that day.

Crane's Black Riders: IT IS BITTER, BITTER

"Nobody is more modern than Mr. Stephen Crane, the young American writer who has lately made a considerable reputation by his military and other novels," wrote the unnamed reviewer in the London Times for 4 February 1897. Crane's 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage was a huge success and was critically applauded (for the most part). Published at about the same time, however, Black Riders and Other Lines was nothing like his novel. For one thing, it was a collection of poems — and avant garde poems, at that. The book was printed in all capital letters, the poems did not rhyme or carry titles, and broke all standard rules of poetic form, some as short as four lines.

Crane must have been relieved by the review in the Times, which called the book "an experiment suggesting Walt Whitman on the one hand and Friedrich Nietzsche on the other." Other critics had simply dismissed the book as "trash" or, in a different comparison to Whitman, one wrote, "there is not a line of poetry from the opening to the closing page. Whitman's Leaves of Grass were luminous in comparison. Poetic lunacy would be a better name for the book." Crane wriggled a little from the sting but was also pleased by the stir the book caused.

The Times reviewer, however, seemed just as ahead of his time as Crane's poems. "Mr. Crane probably has a literary future," he wrote. "His novels have shown that he can observe and record with merciless, if one-sided, realism; his little 'Lines' show that he has ideas." Among those ideas is a frequent question of religion or at least the motivation of gods, a bitter outlook on humanity, strange irony, and a sort of uncomfortable ambiguity of meaning. His imagery often features deserts, monsters, and sage but aloof genius characters. Taking the book as a whole, a reader might feel on the cusp of understanding but Crane makes it difficult and, perhaps, too deeply personal. Consider, for example, number "III":

IN THE DESERT
I SAW A CREATURE, NAKED, BESTIAL,
WHO, SQUATTING UPON THE GROUND,
HELD HIS HEART IN HIS HANDS,
AND ATE OF IT.
I SAID, IS IT GOOD, FRIEND?"
"IT IS BITTER, BITTER," HE ANSWERED;
"BUT I LIKE IT
BECAUSE IT IS BITTER,
AND BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART."

And "XLVI":

MANY RED DEVILS RAN FROM MY HEART
AND OUT UPON THE PAGE,
THEY WERE SO TINY
THE PEN COULD MASH THEM.
AND MANY STRUGGLED IN THE INK.
IT WAS STRANGE
TO WRITE IN THIS RED MUCK
OF THINGS FROM MY HEART.

Richard Henry Dana: Death bring thee rest

Richard Henry Dana, Sr. had lived through most of the early history of the United States. Born only two months after the adoption of the Constitution (his father had signed the Articles of Confederation), he lived through the entire Presidency of George Washington and 17 others before dying during the term of the 19th President Rutherford B. Hayes on February 2, 1879. He was 91 years old.

In his long life, Dana also saw the developing world of American literature as it unfolded. An early American romanticist, he was criticized for his support of the work of Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but lived long enough to see his formerly controversial opinion become conventional. Dana wrote a novel before James Fenimore Cooper and befriended the earliest American poets, including William Cullen Bryant. An ardent patriot, he truly believed in the fervor that created his country and hoped to see its culture and arts flourish with genius. He played his own part in building the arts, not only as an author, poet, and critic, but as a supporter of the arts (he was a friend of painter Washington Allston).

But Dana was frequently ill throughout most of his long life. Unlike his son and namesake, who took to the ocean when faced with health problems, Dana lived an increasingly retired life and embodied the Idle Man, the title of the magazine he founded and edited. When he died, some accounts referred to him as "the oldest of American authors"; several also admitted he had written nothing in his elder years. Among his most famous works was one of his earliest, a poem titled "The Dying Raven." The blank verse poem is over 100 lines long; below is the beginning and ending:

Come to these lonely woods to die alone?
It seems not many days since thou wast heard,
From out the mists of spring, with thy shrill note,
Calling upon thy mates — and their clear answers.
The earth was brown then; and the infant leaves
Had not put forth to warm them in the sun,
Or play in the fresh air of heaven. Thy voice,
Shouting in triumph, told of winter gone,
And prophesying life to the sealed ground,
Did make me glad with thoughts of coming beauties.
And now they're all around us, — offspring bright
Of earth, — a mother, who, with constant care,
Doth feed and clothe them all. — Now o'er her fields,
In blessed bands, or single, they are gone,
Or by her brooks they stand, and sip the stream;
Or peering o'er it, — vanity well feigned —
In quaint approval seem to glow and nod
At their reflected graces. — Morn to meet,
They in fantastic labors pass the night,
Catching its dews, and rounding silvery drops
To deck their bosoms. — There, on high, bald trees,
From varnished cells some peep, and the old boughs
Make to rejoice and dance in warmer winds.
Over my head the winds and they make music;
And grateful, in return for what they take,
Bright hues and odours to the air they give.
Thus mutual love brings mutual delight —
Brings beauty, life; — for love is life — hate, death.
...

I needs must mourn for thee. For I, who have
No fields, nor gather into garners — I
Bear thee both thanks and love, not fear nor hate.
And now, farewell! The falling leaves ere long
Will give thee decent covering. Till then,
Thine own black plumage, which will now no more
Glance to the sun, nor flash upon my eyes,
Like armour of steeled knight of Palestine,
Must be thy pall. Nor will it moult so soon
As sorrowing thoughts on those borne from him, fade
In living man.
                    Who scoffs these sympathies,
Makes mock of the divinity within;
Nor feels he gently breathing through his soul
The universal spirit. — Hear it cry,
"How does thy pride abase thee, man, vain man!
How deaden thee to universal love,
And joy of kindred with all humble things,—
God's creatures all!"
                              And surely it is so.
He who the lily clothes in simple glory,
He who doth hear the ravens cry for food,
Hath on our hearts, with hand invisible,
In signs mysterious, written what alone
Our hearts may read. — Death bring thee rest, poor Bird.

Souls of Black Folk: the grain of truth

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.

Thus opens the preface (or, as the titled it, "The Forethought") of The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, dated from Atlanta, Georgia on February 1, 1903. The book, a major title in African American writing, offers a series of essays on contemporary concerns for black Americans – or, as Du Bois says it, "I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive." He ends his preface by asking if he needs to be clear that he is one of the "black folk" in question ("bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh").

Portions of the chapters had been previously published in esteemed journals like The Atlantic Monthly, The New World, and the revived Dial. Making it even more literary, Du Bois opens each chapter with a lyrical epigraph quoting, among others, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Vaughn Moody, plus Lord Byron, Friederich Schiller, and Elizabeth Barret Browning. Further, each chapter includes music from traditional slave songs, intentionally creating a tension between the high culture art of poetry and the history of repression and enslavement.

In his first chapter, Du Bois says the book is a response to the unasked question, "How does it feel to be a problem?" He argues that black people in America have a long history to overcome before they can be joyful souls. Their struggle did not end with Emancipation, he makes clear. The book ends with a response to his preface, titled "The Afterthought" (italicized here as it was first published):

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed