Birth of Ik Marvel: that great land of the Future

Donald Grant Mitchell was born April 12, 1822, in Norwich, Connecticut, but it would be another couple decades before he became better known under the unusual pen name Ik Marvel. The son of a Congregationalist minister, he went on to study at Yale, and delivered his class's commencement oration in 1841. Shortly after graduating, he took a job in Europe but health brought him back to the United States. While overseas, he wrote a series of letters and dispatches about his experiences in Europe which were published in an Albany newspaper. Back in Connecticut, in 1847, he edited those letters and published a book, Fresh Gleanings. He later returned to Europe to serve briefly as Consul to Venice, a job acquired with the help of Nathaniel Hawthorne, then Consul to Liverpool.

Fresh Gleanings marked the beginning of Marvel's long career in writing and journalism that would last until his death in 1908. Much of his life was spent at a house he purchased and named Edgewood; that area in Connecticut is now named for his home. Two books were inspired by his agrarian lifestyle at Edgewood, My Farm of Edgewood (1863) and Wet Days at Edgewood (1865). He also started his own weekly journal, The Lorgnette, which was mostly satirical, also later published as a book. Perhaps better known was his series of "semi-humorous sketches" titled Reveries of a Bachelor, which went through several editions.

In that collection, which he described as "those floating Reveries which have, from time to time, drifted across my brain," he included a sketch titled "Evening." In it, he imagines the Future as a place presided over by Pride and Ambition where "Fame beckons, sitting high in the heavens." He goes on:

The Future is a great land ; a man cannot go round it in a day; he cannot measure it with a bound; he cannot bind its harvests into a single sheaf. It is wider than the vision, and has no end.

Yet always, day by day, hour by hour, second by second, the hard Present is elbowing us off into that great land of the Future. Our souls indeed, wander to it, as to a home-land; they run beyond time and space, beyond planets and suns, beyond far-off suns and comets, until like blind flies, they are lost in the blaze of immensity, and can only grope their way back to our earth, and our time, by the cunning of instinct.

Cut out the Future—even that little Future, which is the Evening of our life, and what a fall into vacuity! Forbid those earnest forays over the borders of Now, and on what spoils would the soul live?

Richard Watson Gilder later said that Ik Marvel was someone that younger authors looked up to. "His literature was not powerful, but serene and delightful," according to Gilder.

Something concerning the writer of the book

It is often said, "the pleasure of the reader is wonderfully enhanced by knowing something concerning the writer of the book he is about to devour," begins the "Memoir of the Unknown Author," dated April 1, 1829, and inserted at the beginning of the book Tales of the Good Woman, "that the good-natured world actually begins to believe it true, notwithstanding it hath so often grievously yawned over the lives of divers great authors." For this reason, the unknown author writes, books often have portraits and signatures of the author which, he jokes, allow us to make full judgment of the work before having read a word.

The "unknown author" of this book was really James Kirke Paulding, by then the author of several published works, including Salmagundi, written with his friend Washington Irving. Paulding jokes in his "memoir" that the author, however, is meaningless to the enjoyment of reading. Knowing about authors and their habits, he says, is frivolous but "like buttons of cheese-paring on a satin doublet, become illustrious by the company they keep." Similar to Irving's various pseudonyms, like Geoffrey Crayon or Deidrich Knickerbocker, Paulding remains aloof as to his own identity, even suggesting that no image or signature of his is known to exist.

"The lives of literary persons are for the most part destitute of interest and adventure," he claims. Certainly, in other ages they "lived in garrets, and nothing was more common than to find them starved or frozen to death of a cold frosty morning." In what has become, he claims, a "golden age of authors," however, they are instead found in drawing rooms, making speeches, and are often elevated to a similar place in society as a member of Congress. As for the author of this particular book, Paulding teases that his origins are unknown, including the year of his birth, or even where he was born — possibly a place called "Republic of Elsewhere."

As he grew up, he was then taught by the best of all teachers: "self." His schooling abruptly ended, however, in marriage. Following this, he "pursued the bent of his genius a year or two in doing nothing." Idleness, however, soon made him a philosopher and he spent much time in deep thought until, finally, his thoughts were ended by going to college. Eventually he finds a job, though it is forgotten what he did, though he was not good at it, whatever it was. He stayed for a time at an inn which had a sign with a woman lacking a head, which the owner called "A Good Woman" — the inspiration for the title of the book. The author, however, has long since died, and his literary works are only now being offered to the public. All this information, however, comes from the somewhat dubious testimony of the unreliable (fictional) Abraham Acker. The point, however, is that the story of the author is not relevant to the stories in the collection, which equally have little to do with real people:

To that class of ill-natured and prying readers, which is ever finding out personal allusions and individual characters in the most innocent generalities, we will content ourselves with stating that our author certainly died at least ten years ago, according to the testimony of Mr. Acker, who has some idea of having attended his funeral. This single fact, we trust, will serve to do away all suspicion of any allusion to the fashionable society of the present day, since everybody knows that a very large portion of those who figure as leaders in the beau monde at present were utterly unknown at that time.

Pride stoops, e'en valor yields to death

New Hampshire minister Uriah Wilcox had lived a long, exciting life during the early years of the United States. In 1775-1776, he sided with the "United Colonies" against the "Hostile Proceedings of the British Fleets," and helped organize a local militia company for the cause of independence. He gave input on the writing of the first State Constitution for New Hampshire and served on the town of Newport's general assembly before, towards the end of his life, being elected a member of the state House of Representatives. He was 72 when he died on March 18, 1822.

The death of such an important local hero could not go unnoticed by another person from Newport, New Hampshire: Sarah Josepha Hale. Hale was only then about to embark on a career in journalism and magazine publishing that would make her one of the most influential women of the century. Ten days after Wilcox's death, she wrote her poem "To the Memory of Rev. Uriah Wilcox":

Death reigns o'er all—the ghastly king,
On his pale courser traversing,
Aims well his arrow, and the blow
Is sure to lay his victim low.

Life weeps, hearts bleed; but fruitless all;
Youth, beauty, health and virtue fall
An easy prey his power beneath;
Pride stoops, e'en valor yields to death.

The poem is a far cry from her less negative poem about Mary's lamb. Still, Hale praises Wilcox in his death after having lived a life that earned "worth long known, and long belov'd." A life like that, she argues poetically, can not be all sad. It would be selfish, she says, to want to keep one like that on Earth when their spirit was merely on loan from heaven: "The saint survives in yon bright skies, / From earth's low cares the spirit free." She predicts what will happen at the final day of judgment:

When the last trump shall echo—"live!"
And graves their mouldering tenants give;
To that loud summons, whilst the sun,
In sackcloth, mourns his empire done:

The moon is blood, the globe is fire;
Stars fall, the shrinking heavens retire;
And ruin only reigns, where man
Had boasted o'er his little span:

Then, whilst before the judgment seat
The assembled universe shall meet;
Christians, like thee, will hear the word,
"Come, dwell forever with the Lord."

Birth of Helper: stupid and sequacious masses

Hinton Rowan Helper was born outside of Mocksville, North Carolina on December 27, 1829. He went on to become a published author and infuriate most of his fellow Southerners. His perspective may have come, in part, from living outside of the South. After graduating from Mocksville Academy, he moved to New York then went west to join the hunt for gold in California. His lack of success there inspired his book California Land of Gold: Reality vs. Fiction. He was none too pleased with the experience as, in the book's preface, he notes it was in that state that he met "its rottenness and its corruption, its squalor and its misery, its crime and its shame, its gold and its dross." The book was not particularly popular.

Back in North Carolina, however, he published the book that made him infamous in 1857. The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It was a scornful indictment of slavery in the South — but not for the moral reasons typically presented by abolitionists, as in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe's book five years earlier. Hinton did not engage in the sentimentalism of other anti-slavery writers and instead offered an economic point of view (and, certainly, he did not call for racial equality). He particularly denounced the oligarchy established by rich, slave-holding whites, who held social and economic superiority over poorer whites who did not have enslaved people:

It is expected that the stupid and sequacious masses, the white victims of slavery, will believe, and, as a general thing, they do believe, whatever the slaveholders tell them; and thus it is that they are cajoled into the notion that they are the freest, happiest and most intelligent people in the world, and are taught to look with prejudice and disapprobation upon every new principle or progressive movement. Thus it is that the South, woefully inert and inventionless, has lagged behind the North, and is now weltering in the cesspool of ignorance and degradation.

Helper called slaveholders "more criminal than common murderers" and, further, warned that Southerners should fear the enslaved population: "in nine cases out of ten, [they would] be delighted with an opportunity to cut their masters' throats." Without slavery, he argued, poor whites could improve their cultural literacy without the suppression from this oligarchy.

Helper almost certainly did not expect the reaction he got. The book inflamed many of those Southern power-holders whom he had criticized, leading to the legal banning of the book in various Southern states. One account suggests three men in Arkansas were hanged for owning copies. Other writers wrote responses dissecting and denouncing his ideas. Even so, some credited Helper's book as the second most influential anti-slavery work of the century, influencing even Abraham Lincoln himself, who appointed the author as consul to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

He returned to the United States after the Civil War, but was surprised to see the emancipation of slaves did not lead to a renaissance among poor Southern whites (at least by his standards). He wandered from city to city for a bit and wrote a few more books, often focused on his belief in the inferiority of the African race. He lived the next decades in relative obscurity before taking his own life.

Birth of Kinney: That subdued, subduing strain

The moment that Coates Kinney was born in Yates County, New York on November 24, 1826, there were high expectations. On his father's side, he was descended from two families (the Coates family and the Kinney family, hence his name) who were connected to families that came to the New World on the Mayflower. Much of his life was spent trying to figure out how to belong along such noble ancestry.

His parents moved the family to Springboro, Ohio when he was in his early teens. In between going to school, he worked at a saw-mill, as a cooper's apprentice, in a factory and, after graduating, as a teacher. He studied the law for a time and, somewhere in between all this, began contributing to newspapers and magazines in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere. Still, he struggled financially and his three children died in infancy but, in 1854, he purchased a half-interest in a printing office, where he set the type and self-published his first poetry collection. He eventually became an editor but his financial troubles did not end until he received a government appointment during the Civil War as paymaster general for the United States Army.

Kinney was admired by such critics as Julian Hawthorne and William Dean Howells in his later years. The latter said he had mastered the art of poetry and was "a truly great poet, subtle and profound." His most famous poem, if such a term can be used on this forgotten poet, was "Rain on the Roof" (circa 1849):

When the humid shadows hover
   Over all the starry spheres
And the melancholy darkness
   Gently weeps in rainy tears,
What a bliss to press the pillow
   Of a cottage-chamber bed
And lie listening to the patter
   Of the soft rain overhead!

Every tinkle on the shingles
   Has an echo in the heart;
And a thousand dreamy fancies
   Into busy being start,
And a thousand recollections
   Weave their air-threads into woof,
As I listen to the patter
   Of the rain upon the roof.

Now in memory comes my mother,
   As she used in years agone,
To regard the darling dreamers
   Ere she left them till the dawn:
O! I feel her fond look on me
   As I list to this refrain
Which is played upon the shingles
   By the patter of the rain.

Then my little seraph-sister,
   With the wings and waving hair,
And her star-eyed cherub-brother—
   A serene angelic pair—
Glide around my wakeful pillow,
   With their praise or mild reproof,
As I listen to the murmur
   Of the soft rain on the roof.

And another comes, to thrill me
   With her eyes' delicious blue;
And I mind not, musing on her,
   That her heart was all untrue:
I remember but to love her
   With a passion kin to pain,
And my heart's quick pulses quiver
   To the patter of the rain.

Art hath naught of tone or cadence
   That can work with such a spell
In the soul's mysterious fountains,
   Whence the tears of rapture well,
As that melody of Nature,
   That subdued, subduing strain
Which is played upon the shingles
   By the patter of the rain.

Child: true economy of housekeeping

Lydia Maria Child had only been a wife for about a year and a month when, on November 12, 1829, she published The Frugal Housewife (later renamed The American Frugal Housewife). The book was a huge success and was republished in dozens of editions over the next few years. It was dedicated "to those who are not ashamed of Economy." That purpose begins in the first sentence of the introduction:

The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments, of time, as well as materials. Nothing should be thrown away so long as it is possible to make any use of it, however trifling that use may be; and whatever be the size of a family, every member should be employed either in earning, or saving money.

In the pages that follow, Child offers tips on removing stains, on cooking, common injuries or illnesses, and "how to endure poverty," all in a world without running water. Her writing is almost stream of conscious, quickly shifting from one scrap of advice to another without particular attention to theme or organization. This lack of organization drew the attention of critics, including Sarah Josepha Hale, but what really bothered Hale was the book's obsession with money — or, more accurately, with its implication that women should be obsessed with saving money. As she wrote:

Now we do not think that either in earning or saving money consists the chief importance of life... Our men are sufficiently money-making. Let us keep our women and children from the contagion as long as possible.

Hale went so far as to suggest that Child was underqualified to write such a book as she did not yet have children. Nevertheless, the book went into at least 35 editions and was later reissued in a modern version which remains in print in the 21st century. Perhaps Child would have answered her critics with this quote from page 6:

The writer has no apology to offer for this cheap little book of economical hints, except her deep conviction that such a book is needed. In this case, renown is out of the question, and ridicule is a matter of indifference.

For some of the information in this post, I am indebted to Carolyn L. Karcher's work The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (1998).

Birth of Watkins Harper: to stir like a battle-cry

Frances Ellen Watkins was born on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland. Like her parents, she was born free but of African descent. Her parents died when she was still a child and she was raised with the help of her uncle, a minister and educator who ensured his niece attended an academy for "Colored Youth." Her formal schooling ended when she was 13 but she continued teaching herself. She was eventually hired as a teacher herself, first in Ohio and then in Pennsylvania.

Watkins started publishing poetry as a teenager. It was as a public figure that she would make her long career. In her nearly 86 years, she became a published poet, novelist, essayist, a public speaker, an abolitionist, a civil rights and women's rights advocate, particularly under her married name Frances Watkins Harper. Often, Watkins Harper used popular forms of poetry to spread her beliefs in equality, temperance, and piety. Her poetry in particular was meant to inspire an emotional response to ally others in her causes using a simple, almost conversational style. Among her most moving works is her 1895 poem "Songs for the People" (which sums up her life and work quite well):

Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.

Not for the clashing of sabres,
For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
With more abundant life.

Let me make the songs for the weary,
Amid life's fever and fret,
Till hearts shall relax their tension,
And careworn brows forget.

Let me sing for little children,
Before their footsteps stray,
Sweet anthems of love and duty,
To float o'er life's highway.

I would sing for the poor and aged,
When shadows dim their sight;
Of the bright and restful mansions,
Where there shall be no night.

Our world, so worn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.

Music to soothe all its sorrow,
Till war and crime shall cease;
And the hearts of men grown tender
Girdle the world with peace.

Willis's Fugitive Poetry: cheer me as I go

It was on the September 11, 1829 that Nathaniel Parker Willis copyrighted his book Fugitive Poetry, a collection mostly of previously published works. Willis, only 23 years old upon the book's publication, had already met with early success and popularity as a writer. This was in no small part due to his family's long history in publishing and journalism. Willis's title page included a quote from Washington Irving, repeated on his copyright page: "If, however, I can, by lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sorrow; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my reader more in good humor with his fellow beings and himself, surely, surely, I shall not then have written entirely in vain." His earliest major biographer said most of the book was "of no importance."

Many of the poems in Fugitive Poems remained among his famous works throughout Willis's career, including his free verse poem "April." Several showed the influence on him from his conservative religious father. Many are addressed to women — some romantically, some more platonic — and those poems with titles like "On Seeing Through a Distant Window a Belle Completing Her Toilet for a Ball" did little to remove rumors that Willis was living a dissipated and idle life. Even so, at about the same time he was preparing Fugitive Poetry for the press, he was also beginning his career as a periodical editor, first of an annual giftbook called The Token and then a new newspaper he called the American Monthly Magazine. After its failure a couple years later, Willis moved to Europe for a time; it was there that his reputation as a writer began to soar. His poem "The Solitary":

Alone! alone! How drear it is
     Always to be alone!
In such a depth of wilderness,
     The only thinking one!
The waters in their path rejoice,
     The trees together sleep—
But I have not one silver voice
     Upon my ear to creep!

The sun upon the silent hills
     His mesh of beauty weaves,
There's music in the laughing rills
     And in the whispering leaves.
The red deer like the breezes fly
     To meet the bounding roe,
But I have not a human sigh
     To cheer me as I go.

I've hated men—I hate them now—
     But, since they are not here,
I thirst for the familiar brow—
     Thirst for the stealing tear.
And I should love to see the one,
     And feel the other creep,
And then again I'd be alone
     Amid the forest deep.

I thought that I should love my hound,
     And hear my cracking gun
Till I forgot the thrilling sound
     Of voices—one by one.
I thought that in the leafy hush
     Of nature, they would die;
But, as the hindered waters rush,
     Resisted feelings fly.

I'm weary of my lonely hut
     And of its blasted tree,
The very lake is like my lot,
     So silent constantly.
I've lived amid the forest gloom
     Until I almost fear—
When will the thrilling voices come
     My spirit thirsts to hear?

Birth of Pollock: with wild delight

Edward Pollock was born in Philadelphia on September 2, 1823. As a boy, he was never educated formally and started working at age 11. By 14, he had run away from home to find better prospects; he ended up apprenticed to a sign-painter. By 1852, he was in California. He quickly earned respect in the young state and was popular among fellow gold prospectors. He studied law and eventually passed the bar in California.

Pollock also became a poet when, two years after his arrival on the west coast, a friend started a literary journal in need of contributions. The earliest of his published works was "The Falcon," a long poem of 64 stanzas. He wrote mostly poetry with an occasional short story or essay.

A posthumous collection of poems from 1876, though printed by J. B. Lippincott in Pollock's native Philadelphia, was dedicated and "respectfully inscribed" to his adopted state of California. From the collection, his poem "The Choice":

How beats the heart with wild delight
   When on the soul the spells arise
That gladly gush from wine so bright
   And fondly beam from starry eyes!
How melt the clouds of care away
   When sunned in beauty's roseate sheen!
And life how like a cloudless day
   If star-eyed pleasure reigns the queen!
Oh, then no magic so divine
As woman's love, and sparkling wine!

But, ah! the power of light gone by,
   The whirl of passion's tempest o'er,
The cares that clouded life's bleak sky
   Seem darker, heavier than before;
And faint and cold the spirit turns
   From cloud-built halls to earth again,
And the sad soul in darkness mourns
   Earth's weariness and toil and pain:
So pleasure's fairy-dreams depart,
And leave behind an aching heart.

Then let me shun the fading glow
   Of beauty's bright but meteor gleam,
And let my only light below
   Be reason, and religion's beam;
So shall my path, though storms sweep by,
   On warring winds by fury driven,
Be all beneath a cloudless sky,
   Till lost at last in light and heaven,
Where shines o'er blissful climes above
The sunlight of eternal love.

He died at the close of that darksome day

French military leader Napoleon died on May 5, 1821. Only nine years later, the Maine-born poet Isaac McLellan commemorated the man in his poem "The Death of Napoleon." It begins with a dramatic quote from a biography of Napoleon by Walter Scott: "The fifth of May came amid wind and rain. Napoleon's passing spirit was deliriously engaged in a strife more terrible than the elements around. The words 'tite d'armee,' (head of the army,) the last which escaped from his lips, intimated that his thoughts were watching the current of a heady light. About eleven minutes before six in the evening, Napoleon expired." McLellan's poem particularly highlights Napoleon's military victories which, according to those who recorded his alleged last words, were still on his mind:

Wild was the night, yet a wilder night,
Hung round the soldier's pillow,
In his bosom there waged a fiercer fight,
Than the fight on the wrathful billow!

A few fond mourners were kneeling by,
The few that his stern heart cherished;
They knew by his glazed and unearthly eye,
That life had nearly perished.

They knew by his awful and kingly look,
By the order hastily spoken,
That he dreamed of days, when the Nations shook,
And the Nations' hosts were broken.

He dreamed that the Frenchman's sword still slew,
And triumphed the Frenchman's 'eagle ;'
And the struggling Austrian fled anew,
Like the hare before the beagle.

The bearded Russian he scourged again,
The Prussian's camp was routed,
And again on the hills of haughty Spain,
His mighty armies shouted.

Over Egypt's sands, over Alpine snows,
At the Pyramids, at the mountain,
Where the wave of the lordly Danube flows,
And by the Italian fountain,

On the snowy cliffs, where mountain-streams
Dash by the Switzer's dwelling,
He led again, in his dying dreams,
His hosts, the broad earth quelling.

Again Marengo's field was won,
And Jena's bloody battle;
Again the world was overrun,
Made pale, at his cannons' rattle.

He died at the close of that darksome day;
A day that shall live in story:
In the rocky land they placed his clay,
'And left him alone with his glory.'

Cooper: exceedingly anxious to go abroad

James Cooper (he had not yet added the "Fenimore" to his name) was not happy with his financial situation in the United States. He had met with some success and substantial fame from his novels like Precaution, The Pioneer and The Last of the Mohicans but he felt that a job in Europe would be more suitable to him. More importantly, he anticipated that the Europeans had better taste than his fellow Americans.

Accordingly, on March 9, 1826, he wrote to New York Governor De Witt Clinton for help. Though he apologized for the unimportant request compared to his other duties, Cooper hoped Clinton would put in a good word for him for a federal appointment:

I am exceedingly anxious to go abroad with my family, for three or four years, and am induced both by prudence and feeling, to wish to do so, in some situation connected with the Government. My views are far from being very exalted, however, on this subject. I should prefer being on the waters of the Mediterranean, or near them, and would be exceedingly happy to find myself invested with any consulate that would yield me a moderate sum. I confess I know of no particular situation, and after waiting several years with the same desire, I do not find myself more likely to obtain the requisite information in time to apply.

Cooper noted frankly his embarrassment for requesting such a favor, also admitting he was unaware of "the propriety or impropriety" of such a request. He was living on Greenwich Street in New York with his family that winter and, it is said, he once bumped into his neighbor William Cullen Bryant. Cooper invited the poet to join him for dinner at his home at 345 Greenwich Street but Bryant asked him to write the address down lest he forget. The rather gruff Cooper responded, "Can't you remember three-four-five?"

Cooper traveled to Washington D.C. under the advisement of Governor Clinton (and, possibly, from Bryant too). There, Secretary of State Henry Clay offered him a position as Minister to Sweden and Norway; Cooper declined and was instead granted a consulship to Lyons (France). There, he continued to write, particularly stories at sea, including The Red Rover and The Water Witch. The Coopers returned to the United States in 1833.

I do not remember my birth, you see!

Julia Caroline Ripley was born on February 13, 1825, in Charleston, South Carolina. While still a young girl, she moved with her family and eventually settled in Rutland, Vermont. In 1847 she married Seneca M. Dorr, with whom she moved to New York for a decade before returning to Rutland (where she eventually helped establish the public library). She experimented with writing poetry in private but it wasn't until her husband secretly sent one of her poems to a newspaper that she was published. She soon became fairly popular as a writer of both prose and poetry. She published several novels, travel books, and scores of poems, earning the admiration of fellow writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The poems of Julia C. R. Dorr, as she often signed her work, are mostly simple in style and, it is said, she purposely never wrote anything she would not feel comfortable reading to children. Her poem "My Birthday" was playfully addressed to her husband:

My birthday!—" How many years ago?
   Twenty or thirty?" Don't ask me!
"Forty or fifty?"—How can I tell?
   I do not remember my birth, you see!

It is hearsay evidence—nothing more!
   Once on a time, the legends say,
A girl was born—and that girl was I.
   How can I vouch for the truth, I pray?

I know I am here, but when I came
   Let some one wiser than I am tell!
Did this sweet flower you plucked for me
   Know when its bud began to swell?

How old am I? You ought to know
   Without any telling of mine, my dear!
For when I came to this happy earth
   Were you not waiting for me here?

A dark-eyed boy on the northern hills,
   Chasing the hours with flying feet,
Did you not know your wife was born,
   By a subtile prescience, faint yet sweet?

Did never a breath from the south-land come,
   With sunshine laden and rare perfume,
To lift your hair with a soft caress,
   And waken your heart to richer bloom?

Not one? O mystery strange as life!
   To think that we who are now so dear
Were once in our dreams so far apart,
   Nor cared if the other were far or near!

But—how old am I? You must tell.
   Just as old as I seem to you!
Nor shall I a day older be
   While life remaineth and love is true!

Birth of Ethel Lynn: beyond the ink-clogged pen

Ethelinda Eliot was born on January 13, 1827 in Goshen, New York. She was a direct descendant of John Eliot, an educator and minister who was known as the "apostle" of the Native Americans, whom he converted to Christianity, after translating the Bible into the Massachusetts language in the 17th century. She originally wrote under the simplified name "Ethel Lynn" but, after her 1846 marriage, she went by the name Ethel Lynn Beers. She and her husband eventually moved to New Jersey.

The majority of her poems, short stories, and novellas were published in periodicals including the New York Ledger and Harper's, which she later collected in several books in her lifetime. Authorship of her most famous poem ("All Quiet Along the Potomac") came under dispute in her lifetime, but it was immensely popular and was set to music. Much of her work is domestic in nature, sentimental in style, and feature children or families. She uses nature scenes and, particularly, descriptions of flowers but she also writes about spirituality, using words like "the Unseen" or "Master" in reference to the deity. Her poem "A New Friend":

I did not know her yesterday,
     This gentle friend of mine;
There was no niche unfilled, I thought,
     Within this heart of mine.

To-day I know her; songs of mine
     Have spoken for me while unseen,
Stretching like spider lines wind-blown
     Our severed selves between.

When I have done my best she knew;
     When I have failed she cared, —
Looking beyond the ink-clogged pen,
     My unbreathed trials shared.

Ah! through this living type I guess
     How vanished ones may keep
Some busy distaff's subtle thread
     Unbroken, tho' I sleep.

And still I gladder grow to think
     Some souls I do not know
As yet may meet me by and by,
     And, loving me, yet tell me so.

For, after all, a critic's praise
     Or blame comes not so near
As gentle words from loving ones,
     Who hold some simple cadence dear.

For these I think thee, busy pen,
     With point to speak, and plume to bear
My greeting to these unknown friends
     I shall know some time — here or There.

Birth of Taylor: preposterous mementos

"If I were called upon to single out of my thirty years' recollections of Bayard Taylor," wrote Richard Henry Stoddard in his 1893 book Recollections, Personal and Literary, "the one above all others by which I should prefer to remember him, it would be the night on which we celebrated his fortieth birthday (January 11, 1865)."

By the age of 40, Taylor had already published about 10 books, had traveled throughout the United States, Europe, and beyond, outlived his first wife, remarried, built a home in Pennsylvania, and serve his country as a diplomat in Russia. To celebrate his birthday, Stoddard and others looked to the recent celebration of William Cullen Bryant's 70th birthday, the proceedings of which were printed in book form by the Century Club. "I resolved to burlesque that account," Stoddard recalled, and friends sought the "most absurdly appropriate (or inappropriate)" gifts and tokens to present as "preposterous mementos." Stoddard continues his account:

I imagined the decoration of Bayard Taylor's chambers, the gathering of his friends, and wrote letters of regret from those who could not be present, but who somehow happened to be present in spite of their letters. The reading of these missives and sundry copies of verse, and the bestowal of our mementos, provoked more furi than had ever before, or has ever since, distinguished our Taylor nights. It was not so much that they were comical in themselves (though they were) as that we were willing to fool and to be fooled to the top of our bent. The table was in a roar till long after midnight.

On January 11, 1825, 40 years before that party, Bayard Taylor was born in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Though he was his parents' fourth child, he was the first to survive past infancy. Raised as a Quaker, he had been named after a Delaware senator, taking that man's last name as his first. As a boy, he already exhibited the need to explore which defined his adult life (and his writing career). But, as he clarified in his book At Home and Abroad (1859), it wasn't a desire merely to walk that inspired him:

In looking back to my childhood, I can recall no such instinct of perambulation; but on the contrary, the intensest desire to climb upward—so that without shifting the circle of my horizon, I could yet extend it, and take in a far wider sweep of vision. I envied every bird that sat swinging upon the topmost bough of the great, century-old cherry tree; the weather-cock on our barn seemed to me to whirl in a higher region of the air; and to rise from the earth in a balloon, was a bliss which I would almost have given my life to enjoy.

Birth of Rand: Do ye miss me?

Marion H. Rand was born in Philadelphia on January 5, 1824, though she eventually moved to South Carolina (where she died at age 25). Her writing began as a hobby when she was 8, though she was published by age 14. Her work was accepted by popular magazines and journals including Graham's and Godey's Lady's Book. Her early death, said some critics, prevented her from realizing her full potential as a poet. Nevertheless, her work was collected in major anthologies of women's writing, including The Female Poets of America, edited by Thomas Buchanan Read, and American Female Poets, edited by Caroline May.

Very little is recorded of the life of Marion Rand, as she achieved no substantial fame in her lifetime. Her poem "Home," however, may glance at her own family life and, if autobiographical, demonstrates a tender feeling marked by her absence from them. The poem begins with the adage "Absence makes the heart grow fonder":

Do ye miss me, dear ones, when from our loved home
   So long this yearning spirit hath been parted?
And do ye look with longings like mine own
   To welcome back again the weary-hearted?
                            Do ye miss me yet?

In the bright morning hour, when I was ever
   The first to greet thee at the social board,
Thou, who though often saddened, yet didst never
   Withhold thine answering smile and loving word,
                            My gentle Mother.

When to our daily tasks together turning,
   Thou who wert ever with me, day by day,
Thy young companions and their pleasures scorning,
   Lest I should be too lonely on my way,
                            My merry Brother.

When at the midday meal again unbroken
   Our little circle met, e'en now I see
My Mother's look of chiding, yet unspoken,
   When I forgot the reverence due to thee,
                            Our first, "our Eldest."

In the cool twilight hour, when we would gather
   In playful converse, and thy toils were o'er,
Dost thou not miss me? too, my graver Brother,
   Now that thy loving arm can clasp no more
                            Thine absent Sister?

When darker night closed in, and early seeking
   My quiet couch, there peacefully to rest,
How I recall that glance so fondly speaking,
   As thou wouldst draw me to thy care-worn breast,
                            My dear, kind Father.

And thou, bright cherub in thy path of flowers,
   Strown by the hand of love afresh each day,
Thou hast not known the pang of lonely hours,
   Thou hast not missed me on thy gladsome way,
                            Our household darling.

But through the long, long day, in every hour,
   In all the heart can feel, the eye can see,
Hast thou not felt the parting's bitter power?
   Hast thou not missed me, e'en as I miss thee,
                            My own sweet Sister?

Guest post: Birth of Higginson

American literary history doesn’t feature too many significant villains, but Thomas Wentworth Higginson would certainly seem to qualify. Higginson, who was born on December 22, 1823, has come to be known principally for two destructive roles in relationship to Emily Dickinson: his editorial critiques of her poetry in her lifetime (which, the accounts often go, discouraged her even further from seeking publication or audience); and his editorial revisions of her poetry after her death (which led to the standardized versions of her works that first gained national prominence in the late 19th century and were only challenged many decades later).

While Higginson did contribute to some of those posthumous revisions (such as insisting that each poem have a title), it seems clear that most were due instead to Mabel Loomis Todd; Higginson himself expressed strong reservations about what was being lost in the process. Moreover, and to my mind even more importantly, Higginson's evolving editorial relationship to Dickinson while she was alive was far more complex, and more meaningful to the poet, than the standard narrative suggests. Higginson wrote with sensitivity and candor about the stages, limits, and possibilities of that relationship, through the specific lens of Dickinson's challenging and compelling letters to him (which constitute, as do all of her letters, poems in their own right), in an 1891 essay for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Emily Dickinson's Letters."

If the standard narratives of Higginson's roles and relationship with Dickinson are thus frustratingly simplistic and inaccurate on their own terms, the focus on them also obscures his hugely meaningful contributions to American literature, culture, and society throughout the second half of the 19th century. Perhaps one reason why Higginson and Dickinson could not quite understand each other was that for Higginson, the social and political realms were apparently entirely inseparable from the literary; virtually all of his published works engage directly with his activist and progressive goals and efforts. A dedicated abolitionist and the Colonel of the first authorized regiment of U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War (the First South Carolina Volunteers), Higginson later wrote Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870) about those experiences. A lifelong advocate for women’s rights, he published readable arguments for those ideas in works such as Common Sense about Women (1881) and Women and Men (1888). And when he turned in his final decade to biographies and anthologies of American literature, such as the lectures collected in A Readers History of American Literature (1903), he not only helped define our literary tradition for a new century, but illustrated his own prominent place in that tradition.

For all those reasons, we would do well to afford Higginson that place as we continue to redefine our literary and cultural heritage.

*Ben Railton is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. He has previously served as President of the New England American Studies Association and currently maintains the AmericanStudies blog. His most recent book, Redefining American Identity, was published by Macmillan in March 2011.

Birth of Shadd: vice is discountenanced

She was born on October 9, 1823 in Wilmington, Delaware and educated for a time in West Chester, Pennsylvania, but Mary Ann Shadd (later Mrs. Cary) eventually moved to Canada after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850. She sought full racial integration, allowing all races to co-mingle without repercussion or social disdain. Her earliest writings on the topic was Hints to the Colored People of the North, published in 1849. In it, she argued that black people had to fight for their own rights, not wait for white leaders to act on their behalf (an ideal which her father also advocated as he assisted fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad).

Shadd soon found that Canadians, though they had banned slavery by 1834, still segregated based on race. Other African-Canadians promoted the creation of a black identity that would allow them to prosper but Shadd became controversial for insisting on full integration with whites. She advocated her ideas through teaching, lecturing, and the establishment of a press and newspaper, The Provincial Freeman. She is considered the first black female publisher in North America. When the Civil War broke out, Shadd returned to the United States and encouraged black men to enlist.

Another of her books, A Plea for Emigration in 1852, helps potential runaway slaves and free blacks who are considering the move to Canada. In the book, she offers information on local climate, agriculture, and cost of living. Though she repeats throughout that she is not necessarily advocating the move, but merely giving enough background to allow an informed decision, she also writes:

The conclusion arrived at in respect to Canada, by an impartial person, is, that no settled country in America offers stronger inducements to colored people. The climate is healthy, and they enjoy as good health as other settlers, or as the natives; the soil is of the first quality; the laws of the country give to them, at first, the same protection and privileges as to other persons not born subjects; and after compliance with Acts of Parliament affecting them, as taking oath, and they may enjoy full "privileges of British birth in the Province." The general tone of society is healthy; vice is discountenanced, and infractions of the law promptly punished; and, added to this, there is an increasing anti-slavery sentiment, and a progressive system of religion.

*Recommended reading: Mary Ann Shadd Car: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (1999) by Jane Rhodes.

Birth of Whitney: part of the infinite plan

Adeline D. T. Whitney was born in Boston on September 15, 1824. She eventually settled in Milton, Massachusetts, and lived in that town for over sixty years. Though she wrote primarily for children, even critics and editors of the day admitted that adults were reading her work just as much. Perhaps her most obvious attempt at connecting both audience demographics was in one of her earliest books, the 1857 collection Mother Goose for Grown-Ups.

In the book, she offers her take on a few time-honored favorites as well as more obscure tales. Her version of Humpty Dumpty expands on the original four-line poem by generalizing a moral:

Full many a project that never was hatched
Falls down, and gets shattered beyond being patched;
And luckily, too! for if all came to chickens,
The things without feathers might go to the dickens...

Suppose every aspirant writing a book
Contrived to get published, by hook or by crook;
Geologists then of a later creation
Would be startled, I fancy, to find a formation
Proving how the poor world did most wofully sink
Beneath mountains of paper, and oceans of ink!

Indeed, she says, not everything can reach its full potential and dreams can be shattered as easily as eggs. But, Whitney surmises, good can come of those incidents as well. For example, women who do not marry (apparently considered an ultimate goal in achieving perfection) can be come "the good aunts" who knit stockings for their nieces and nephews, or perhaps nurses to sing and rock the young babies. Of course, even unmarried spinsters play their roles "to look after orphans, and primary schools." She concludes:

No! Failure's a part of the infinite plan;
Who finds that he can't, must give way to who can;
And as one and another drops out of the race,
Each stumbles at last to his suitable place.

So the great scheme works on, — though, like eggs from the wall,
Little designs to such ruin may fall,
That not all the world's might, of its horses or men,
Could set their crushed hopes at the summit again.

Utterly disgusted with authorship

In 1822, James Gates Percival admitted, "I am utterly disgusted with authorship." He vowed never to write another line of poetry and instead began teaching chemistry and practicing as an occasional medical doctor. Nevertheless, he agreed to present a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa Society at his alma mater Yale College that fall. Soon, he felt he had made a mistake and instead presented an oration — not a poem.

But, three years later, Percival announced to a friend, "I have been appointed to deliver a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa at New Haven, and am resolved to appear there." Their meeting that year was on September 13, 1825. For it, he prepared a long poem which he titled "The Mind." The poem begins with his statement of purpose:

Of Mind, and its mysterious agencies,
And most of all, its high creative Power,
In fashioning the elements of things
To loftier images, than have on earth
Or in the sky their home — that come to us
In the still visitation of a dream,
Or rise in light before us when we muse;
Or at the bidding of the mightier take
Fixed residence in fitly sounding verse,
Or on the glowing canvass, or in shapes
Hewn from the living rock: — of these, and all
That wake us in our better thoughts, and lead
The spirit to the enduring and sublime,
It is my purpose now to hold awhile
Seemly discourse, and with befitting words
Cloth the conceptions, I have sought to frame.

The poem is a strange, rambling, unrhymed, and meterless mesh of abstract thoughts. In a sense, "The Mind" was more like another oration than a poem. One account says he stopped reading halfway through and sat down, declining to finish. Another says he asked not to read it at the ceremony and, when pressed, rushed through it so quickly that his reading was referred to as a "laughable one." Perhaps Percival's reticence to present a poem in 1822 was justified; his 1825 poem went without a publisher for months. Instead, a group of friends paid him for his manuscript and had it printed. Though they offered it to bookstores, very few copies were sold.

After this disastrous period of authorship attempts in the 1820s, Percival turned to something more practical and less imaginative: assisting Noah Webster in the creation of a dictionary of the English language.

Birth of Warner: To own a bit of ground

Born in Plainfield, Massachusetts on September 12, 1829, Charles Dudley Warner's early life was marked by instability. His father died when the boy was only 5 years old (but not before inspiring in him a love of books) and he was taken in by a guardian until 1842. That year, he was retrieved by his mother and relocated to Cazenovia, New York. While a student at Hamilton College, Warner began contributing articles to The Knickerbocker and other journals.

After college, he found himself in Missouri, then Pennsylvania, then Illinois as he attempted to find a career suited to his nature. He finally took an editorial position in Connecticut just as the Civil War was beginning. Finally settled, he worked in that role until his death in 1900. On the side, he had published eleven essay collections, four novels (one in collaboration with his friend Mark Twain), eight travel books, and even a couple biographies.

He first drew national attention in 1870-1871 with his book My Summer in a Garden (published with an introduction by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, it includes several chapters on Calvin, the cat owned by Harriet Beecher Stowe). The book is presented as a weekly chronicle of a summer spent tending a garden. Throughout, Warner offers a wry wit full of tongue-in-cheek humor.

"Love of dirt is among the earliest of passions," he begins in his preliminary chapter, "as it is the latest." Playing in the dirt is, he says, a basic instinct:

So long as we are dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wild-oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there. To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch their renewal of life, — this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

Warner's most important advice to all gardeners holds true today: "Fertilize! Fertilize! Fertilize!"