Lathrop on Gettysburg: an angry embrace

25 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, survivors of the bloody battle joined for a reunion at the scene where it all happened, on July 3, 1888. The guest speaker for the gathering was the Hawaii-born poet, editor, and novelist George Parsons Lathrop, perhaps best known as husband of Rose Hawthorne, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The poem he presented that day was simply titled "Gettysburg: A Battle Ode." Despite how his poem begins — "Victors, living, with laureled brow, / And you that sleep beneath the sward!" — Lathrop particularly addressed the Confederate veterans who had lost that day in 1863. He emphasized the peaceful reunion of these former foes, who "fiercely warred" not so long ago, but now, "Brother and brother, now, we chant a common chord."

Lathrop's poem also gives specifics about the day, including individual soldiers and officers who he praises for their bravery. He even gives a play-by-play of which groups charged who and when. Before all that, however, he said the scene was "blameless" even as it is now "known to nations far away." In fact, he describes how the day was, otherwise, a normal, peaceful one before the "living lines of foemen" appeared, full of the tragic "Madness of desire to kill."

The farms that hosted the battle become a garden for those men who will die and be harvested by Death. The poem is purposely all-inclusive of all sides, even to the point that Lathrop gives a sort of inventory of those involved:

Men of New Hampshire, Pennsylvanians,
   Maine men, firm as the rock’s rough ledge!
Swift Mississippians, lithe Carolinians
   Bursting over the battle’s edge!
Bold Indiana men; gallant Virginians;
   Jersey and Georgia legions clashing;—
Pick of Connecticut; quick Vermonters;
   Louisianians, madly dashing;—
And, swooping still to fresh encounters,
   New York myriads, whirlwind-led!—
All your furious forces, meeting,
   Torn, entangled, and shifting place,
Blend like wings of eagles beating
   Airy abysses, in angry embrace.

The battle which brings these foes into an intermingled mix of weapons and bodies is juxtaposed with the re-union of the states, and the reunion of the veterans ("like a bride"). Together, these men join in mourning and in celebration, regardless of previous alliances.

    Two hostile bullets in mid-air
            Together shocked,
            And swift were locked
    Forever in a firm embrace.
    Then let us men have so much grace
        To take the bullets' place,
         And learn that we are held
            By laws that weld
            Our hearts together!
    As once we battled hand to hand,
        So hand in hand to-day we stand,
            Sworn to each other,
            Brother and brother,
    In storm and mist, or calm, translucent weather:
    And Gettysburg’s guns, with their death-giving roar,
    Echoed from ocean to ocean, shall pour
         Quickening life to the nation’s core;
            Filling our minds again
With the spirit of those who wrought in the
                        Field of the Flower of Men!

McCann on Saltus: a genius died

After Francis Saltus Saltus's midnight death, his friend John Ernest McCann was immediately inspired to write a poem to the deceased poet. Simply titled "Francis S. Saltus," the poem's three stanzas pay tribute to a multi-talented genius, and is dated June 25, 1889:

A genius died last night, about whose brow
   Fame never twined the laurel and the rose.
   A master he of music, verse and prose,
Who lived, laughed, loved, and suffered, to endow

The world with buds and blossoms from the bough
   That sways within the garden where Thought grows
   When the gale of Inspiration madly blows
The daisies of sweet Song before God's plow!

Ah! who can wear the laurel, now he's dead?
   Not one among the many whom he knew!
      Pluck not the leaf for any—leave it there;
And Time will weave it for his wondrous head,
   And Fame may bear it up beyond the blue—
      To where he sits and laughs with Baudelaire! 

Saltus and McCann were close enough that they collaborated on at least three poems, which McCann published the next year in his compilation Songs from an Attic. That collection also included his memorial verses to Saltus, though it was altered to combine the first two stanzas into one longer stanza. In his poem, McCann (who was more well known as a playwright than a poem) also acknowledges Saltus's inspiration from French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose lifestyle was equally influential on Saltus; like Baudelaire, he had a strong affinity for alcohol, particularly absinthe.

Death of Saltus: when men perish, I rejoice

Francis Saltus Saltus died in Tarrytown, New York on June 24, 1889, at the age of 39. "His trouble was a gastric one," the New York Times reported, and for several days he was unable to eat. Despite his death at an early age, Saltus was quite accomplished: He could reportedly speak in 10 languages, had written four comic operas, had poetry published (in multiple languages) in periodicals throughout the country and the world, and edited his own humorous magazine. He left several thousand poems unpublished as well. Most of Saltus's poems were comical in nature and, as such, perhaps it is fitting he was buried in the famous Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, also the final resting place of another writer known for his humor, Washington Irving. His poem "The Delights of Doom":

I love to visit unknown graves
     When snow the woodland buries,
And hear the wild wind when it raves
     Over grim cemeteries.

I glory in the sight of tombs,
     O'er slabs I love to ponder;
And I am glad when in the glooms
     Of humid crypts I wander.

I love to hear the dolorous voice
     Of anguish and of mourning,
And when men perish, I rejoice
     At death's untimely warning.

I fain would have the poet's fire,
     To glorify in verses
Death, doom, and all disaster dire,
     Shrouds, monument, and hearses.

I see the morgue with eager eyes,
     The pastime never varies;
And I reap pleasure and surprise
     Reading obituaries.

Death in all forms to me is sweet,
     And I am a believer
In awful plagues and pests effete
     Polluting towns with fever.

War pleases me when thousands lie
     Mangled in woods and closes;
And of all flowers beneath the sky
     I worship tuberoses.

Do not misjudge and say I'm mad,
     And cry against my maker,
But the truth is, my biz is bad,
     And I'm an undertaker.

Death of Alfred B. Street: life's last breath

New York poet Alfred B. Street died June 2, 1881 in Albany, New York. He was 69 years old. The Poughkeepsie born poet started his career as a lawyer and served as the state librarian in New York for over 30 years until his death. As many did in the period, he took a literary turn and began submitting to newspapers and magazines before publishing his first collection, The Burning of Schenectady and Other Poems, in 1842. Several works followed, and Street was particularly noted for his forest imagery and ample use of Native American legends and folklore.

Street was buried in the Albany Rural Cemetery, an early example of the American landscape or rural cemetery movement, and today a National Historic Landmark. Street had written a poem about that burial ground decades earlier:

When life's last breath has faintly ebbed away,
And naught is left but cold unconscious clay,
Still doth Affection bend in anguish deep,
O'er the pale brow, to fondly gaze and weep.
What though the soul hath soared in chainless flight;
Round the spurned frame still plays a sacred light,
A hallowed radiance never to depart,
Poured from its solemn source, the stricken heart.
Not to the air should then be given the dead,
Not to the flame, nor yet cold ocean's bed,
But to the earth, — the earth from whence it rose,
There should the frame be left to its repose.
There our great mother guards her holy trust,
Spreads her green mantle o'er the sleeping dust;
There glows the sunshine — there the branches wave,
And birds yield song, flowers fragrance round the grave.

There oft to hold communion do we stray,
There droops our mourning memory when away,
And e'en when years have passed, our homeward feet
Seek first with eager haste that spot to greet;
And the fond hope lives ever in our breast
When death, too, claims us, there our dust shall rest.

Street then describes and praises the interplay of the natural landscape of the cemetery with its solemn duty to house the dead. He imagines a man in mourning who visits a grave and is joined in sympathy with Nature itself. The smile of his dead infant is reflected by the flowers, its laugh echoed by the birds. The poem goes on:

Through these branched paths will Contemplation wind,
And stamp wise Nature's teachings on his mind;
As the white grave-stones glimmer to his eye,
A solemn voice will thrill him, "Thou must die;"
When Autumn's tints are glittering in the air,
That voice will whisper to his soul, "Prepare;"
When Winter's snows are spread o'er knoll and dell,
"Oh this is death," that solemn voice will swell;
But when with Spring, streams leap and blossoms wave,
"Hope, Christian, hope," 'twill say, "there's life beyond the grave."

Bierce on Bowman: groping in the night

James F. Bowman (pictured) was at the center of California's burgeoning literary culture, and was one of the main figures in founding the Bohemian Club. That organization was made up of several men who frequently crossed between literature and journalism, including Ambrose Bierce. When Bowman died of stomach cancer in April 1882, Bierce wrote a sonnet to his friend, published in the May 5, 1882 issue of the San Francisco Wasp, and given the title "J.F.B.":

How well this man unfolded to our view
    The world's beliefs of Death and Heaven and Hell—
    This man whose own convictions none could tell,
Nor if his maze of reason had a clew.
Dogmas he wrote for daily bread, but knew
    The fair philosophies of doubt so well
    That while we listened to his words there fell
Some that were strangely comforting if true.
Marking how wise we grew upon his doubt,
    We said: "If so, by groping in the night,
    He can proclaim some certain paths of trust,
How great our profit if he saw about
His feet the highways leading to the light."
    Now he sees all. Ah, Christ! his mouth is dust!

Bowman had been known for his kind and genial nature. Years earlier, as editor of the Californian, Bowman included the first poem Bierce ever published, "Basilica." He had also assisted in collecting and published the works of California poet Edward Pollock after his death. As the above sonnet attests, Bowman was a bit of an armchair philosopher and was particularly a religious skeptic. The poem concludes with the irony that Bowman was, at least among this circle of friends, the first to know the truth of the afterlife.

Bowman was also a writer and poet himself. It was reported that his poem "Nature's Paraclete" was written only a few days before his death. The poem concludes:

And oft at midnight's solemn time,
   Waking, I know a presence near,
And feel my spirit's altered clime,
   And breathe a rarer atmosphere.
And, lo! the thoughts I thought by day
Have changed and vanished quite away.
   In this new light, so wondrous clear,
   All things transfigured do appear

Just seven verses rhymed on two

      A rondelet
Is just seven verses rhymed on two.
      A rondelet
      Is an old jewel quaintly set
In poesy—a drop of dew
Caught in a roseleaf. Lo! for you,
      A rondelet.

Charles Henry Lüders published the above poem in the April 27, 1889 issue of the Boston based newspaper The Literary World. The poem, titled "Rondelet," was an accurate description and example of that French poetic form. The term literally translates to "short poem with a refrain," as is seen in lines 1, 3, and 7.

Lüders was a Philadelphia based poet born in 1858. It was only in the last few years of his life, however, that he began contributing to periodicals and some recognized him as one of the most promising up-and-coming poets in the United States. He died, however, less than two years after publishing his rondelet. He was remembered for his humility, his genial nature, and his distrust of the value of his own writing. His only collection of poetry was published after his death by his friends. That collection did not include "Rondelet." The book did publish several even shorter poems, a series of nine quatrains (four lines each), including "Elusion":

How much that we at first intend
Escapes us ere we reach the end.
At the White City's outer walls
The weary pilgrim faints and falls.

And, to conclude with a relatable quote, his short story "The Lost Elixir" begins:

I am very fond of books; old books in particular; not that I have ever attempted to pose as a bibliophile, but simply that I like to loiter in second-hand book-stores and libraries, looking over one old volume after another until my eyes ache and my fingers are begrimed with dust and decay.

Campbell: Every book ought to have a preface

"My printer says that every book ought to have a preface," wrote Alfred Gibbs Campbell from Newark, New Jersey in his requisite preface dated April 7, 1883. The passage opened his Poems, which was apparently his first (and only) book compilation. Not much is known about the New Jersey born African American poet who also ran a paper mill and edited a newspaper. The book was released shortly before his death. As he states in his preface:

I will therefore simply say that, acting upon the suggestion of personal friends and in accordance with my own inclination, I have here gathered in a volume, (rather promiscuously it must be confessed,) various pieces in verse which I have written during the past thirty years or so. For want of a more distinctive name, I call them "Poems," which possibly, in a minor sense, they may be. I claim for them no literary excellence. If in them there is anything worthy of living, it will live... Should their appearance in this form afford pleasure to my friends, I shall be gratified.

Campbell also notes his anti-slavery poems in the collection, showing his role in the great "moral warfare," as he calls it, against "the giant crime against human nature and its Divine Author." Certainly, the book includes more than this theme. Throughout the book, Campbell explores man's relationship with God, his role on Earth, his devotion to his country (flawed though it may be), and frequently searches for moral guidance. Most evoke his deep religious beliefs. His poem "Ships at Sea":

All of us have our ships at sea;
   Will they ever reach port, I wonder.
A few may sail in merrily,
   But most will the wild waves sunder.

And some which do reach port, I guess,
   Will discharge only damaged cargoes;
Better had they been kept by stress
   Of weather, or Fate's embargoes.

Trust not thy treasures on the sea,
   Nor idly expect joy to-morrow:
Take what to-day doth offer thee.
  Nor pleasure nor trouble borrow.

Death of Darley: dazzling in their splendor

Felix Octavius Carr Darley, often known by his abbreviated name F. O. C. Darley, died in his home in Delaware on March 27, 1888, likely due to heart disease. He was 66 years old. Considered by some to be the father of modern illustration in the United States, Darley provided drawings for the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Dickens, and others. His style ranged from simple outlines, to the elegant and dramatic, and even to caricature. For a time, he also worked for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, D.C.

In addition to working with the literature of others, Darley also wrote (and illustrated) his own book, Sketches Abroad with Pen and Pencil (1868), based on a trip to Europe during the Civil War. Like many other authors, Darley claimed these "sketches" were not intended for publication but for the private circulation of family and friends — until a friend convinced him otherwise. "I was induced to put them into type and use them as a thread whereon to hang the illustrations," many of which he claimed were drawn on trains, steamers, and even on a mule. Darley, in fact, offered that scene both pictorially and in prose. Traveling through Mont Blanc, he had to ride on a mule, "which I found a very hairerecting process." He describes the experience:

I brought up the rear on a critter that looked like an apple on four sticks. The tormenting propensity these creatures have for walking on the outer edge of these mountain passes, is rather alarming to the inexperienced. You sometimes look down, two thousand feet, over your mule's neck, as he turns an angle of the road, into the misty depths below. The view we beheld on reaching the top of La Flegere was glorious! It embraces the entire chain of Mont Blanc, from the Col de Balme to the Glacier des Bossons. Directly opposite were the glittering points of the Aiguilles Vertes, which rose before us like a mighty vision; the clouds floating about their lofty peaks, now shutting them from our sight, and now revealing them, with a strange phosphorescent light playing upon their snow-clad summits, which were dazzling in their splendor.

Though born in Philadelphia, for a time a resident of New York City, and the owner of a home in Delaware, Darley was laid to rest at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the native town of his wife.

Death of Mathews: to a laurelled home

Cornelius Mathews, a one-time lion of New York City publishing, died on March 25, 1889, mostly forgotten, and mostly irrelevant. He was 71 years old (sometimes erroneously reported as age 75). In the 1840s, he had been one of the loudest advocates for a national literature in the United States as part of the Young America movement. He had founded the Arcturus with Evert Augustus Duyckinck in 1840, a journal which published the work of Herman Melville, among others. Mathew's novel The Behemoth may have been one of Melville's inspirations for Moby-Dick.

In 1843, he founded the Copyright Club and demanded international copyright, while declaring that American writers should celebrate America in their writing. His incessant writings and speeches on the subject often made him a target from people who disagreed and he was frequently satirized and caricatured. In his A Fable for Critics (1848), James Russell Lowell referred to Mathews as a "small man in glasses" whose paranoia about his enemies has him muttering about "murderers!" and "asses!" Even those who also advocated for improving American writing found him unbearable, including anthologist/critic Rufus W. Griswold, who said his cause had infected him like a disease.

But Mathews himself complied with his own goals was a published poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Before his death, however, he had not published anything new in some 30 years. One Ohio newspaper referred to him as the "late Cornelius Mathews, of New York" in 1875. Today, he is best remembered for his relationships with other writers and critics rather than as a writer and critic in his own right.

Curiously, Mathews's funeral was held at St. Ann's Church at 5th and 18th in New York City, a congregation that catered to the deaf and mute. One might be curious to know if his disappearance from the public spotlight could have been due to hearing loss, though no source seems to mention it. From his 1843 poem, "The Poet":

The mighty heart that holds the world at full,
Lodging in one embrace the father and the child,
The toiler, reaper, sufferer, rough or mild,
All kin of earth, can rightly ne'er grow dull;
For on it tasks, in this late age, are laid
That stir its pulses at a thousand points;
Its ruddy haunts a thousand hopes invade,
And Fear runs close to smutch what Hope anoints.
On thee, the mount, the valley and the sea,
The forge, the field, the household call on thee...

Gather all kindreds of this boundless realm
To speak a common tongue in thee! Be thou —
Heart, pulse, and voice, whether pent hate o'erwhelm
The stormy speech or young love whisper low.
Cheer them, immitigable battle-drum!
Forth, truth-mailed, to the old unconquered field,
And lure them gently to a laurelled home,
In notes more soft than lutes or viols yield.
Fill all the stops of life with tuneful breath;
Closing their lids, bestow a dirge-like death

Sargent on spiritualism and science

Epes Sargent had a long and successful career as an editor and poet, particularly in his native Massachusetts, in his adopted state of New York and, for a time, in Washington, D.C., where he befriended notables like Daniel Webster. Well before the end of his long life, he returned to Boston. At his home there, on March 13, 1880, Sargent hosted an "experiment in psychography."

Sargent had become interested in spiritualism shortly after the Civil War, if not sooner, and published at least three books on the subject. A psychic named Dr. Watkins, presumably Charles Watkins, brought together several men at Sargent's home. He put two blank slates face-to-face and asked the men to hold on to the edges while placing a piece of pencil between them. They heard the pencil scratching and were surprised to see after a moment that messages had been written on the slates. As the participants said in a co-authored statement, "We all distinctly heard the pencil moving, and on opening the slates found an intelligent message in a strong masculine hand, in answer to a question asked by one of the company." The incident was repeated with brass locks on the slates; this attempt revealed a woman's handwriting.

Dr. Watkins and Epes Sargent, then, were using a rather unique form of automatic writing to communicate with spirits. Sargent was convinced enough by the "experiment in psychography" that he reported it in his last completed book, The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism, published in 1880. Sargent admitted in his preface that putting the two concepts together would be offensive to some people. But, he says, a true scientist must admit that he does not know all the laws of nature and the universe and must accept that there are forces he can never fully understand. He notes:

The credulity of unbelief threatens new dangers. By dismissing the phenomena as impossible, unnatural, or supernatural, specialists in science, — who, however eminent in their own departments, are ignorant of the first rudiments of the psycho-physical science, now inchoate,— instead of checking superstition by their scornful attitude, are really giving it its excuse for being. Persons experimentally sure of the phenomena, finding that they can get no guidance or light from men of science, qualified by laborious study and experiment to explain the occurrences, either put premature constructions on what they witness, or yield a too hasty credence to the assurances of some medium or medial pretender claiming a divine or high spiritual inspiration...
But the time has gone by when the facts of this volume could be dismissed as coincidences, delusions, or frauds. The hour is coming, and now is, when the man claiming to be a philosopher, physical or metaphysical, who shall overlook the constantly recurring phenomena here recorded, will be set down as behind the age, or as evading its most important question. Spiritualism is not now "the despair of science," as I called it on the title-page of my first book on the subject. Among intelligent observers its claims to scientific recognition are no longer a matter of doubt.

Death of Wasson: We hail the hour

A minor poet and Transcendentalism-inspired minister, David Atwood Wasson died on January 21, 1887. Born in Maine and raised in a Calvinist household, he briefly attended Bowdoin College, followed by the Bangor Theological Seminary, and preached from a series of pulpits in Massachusetts: Groveland, Worcester, Medford, and Boston. At least twice he lost his job due to his radical views, particularly his support of abolishing slavery.

All the while, Wasson contributed to William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and, later, to the Atlantic Monthly. Modern critics have called him unusual for a Transcendentalist because of his careful arguments he gives to explain his ideas, rather than merely offering revelatory announcements from his idols like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Further, he has been called radical, yet not liberal. His writings are both essays and poetry ("The great poets tell us nothing new," he once said. "They remind us."), including one dedicated to Garrison, written about five years after the newspaperman and reformer had died. The poem, "To W. G. L.," is dated January 21, 1884 — exactly three years before Wasson's own death:

Thou who art ours and all men's friend,
Whom Nature gave to be and spend
Her dearest treasure, love and truth,
And justice joined with tender ruth,
When now returns thy natal day,
What for thee should our wishes pray?
What wish we for the silver star
Whose beam doth kiss our eyes from far?
Enough for it a star to be,
Enough for us its light to see.
What wish we for the breathing rose,
That, filled with grace and sweetness blows,
And its fair petals spreads about
To let the fragrant spirit out?
Its being is its blessing best;
And we in it are also blest,
If often we may hither come
To taste its fragrance, see its bloom.
O friend! we wish thee naught to-day,
Thy presence takes the power away;
And joyous while that grace is lent,
We hail the hour, and are content.

Lampton's yawps: They gloried in the glory

William J. Lampton did not believe he was a poet. No, he said, he did not poeticize important or profound topics or sing his "soulful sufferings." Instead, this Kentucky-born second cousin of Samuel Clemens referred to his fun and humorous verses as "yawps" and he himself was a "yawpist." His first collection, Yawps: And Other Things (1900) made that preference clear. Many of the "yawps" had been previously published in the New York Sun ("so the worst is over"). All this is by way of introduction of Lampton's poem celebrating January 8, appropriately titled "January Eighth, 1889":

There were lots of celebrations
   In the West and in the East;
There were viands and libations
   For the largest and the least;
There were speeches, speeches, speeches;
   The torrent would not dam,
When it turned upon the hero
   Who punched old Pakenham.

They gloried in the glory
   Of a glorious past, and told,
In hyperbolic story,
   Of the wondrous deeds of old;
They pointed to the future,
   And saw on Vict'ry's brow
A limb of lustrous laurel,
   They cannot see there now.

At the time of all this blowing,
   'Way down in Tennessee
A grim, gray ghost was showing
   Some signs of energy;
He sighed deep in his bosom,
   And now and then would cuss,
The meanwhile turning over
   In his sarcophagus.

He sat up, and intently,
   With hand up to his ear,
He nodded, not quite gently,
   At most that he could hear.
He listened to the buncombe,
   And thought of recent facts,
Whereby his party'd got it
   Where chickens get the axe.

He knew the wretched story,
   Which had disturbed him there
A triumph, transitory,
   Disaster and despair.
Then hearing still the speaking,
   He shook his bony head,
And groaned: "By the Eternal,
   I'm glad that I am dead!"

The poem is a reference to the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 and the conflict's long-dead hero Andrew Jackson. The day was a national holiday in recognition of that event 75 years prior. The "yawp," then, satirizes how the present generation celebrates the past one, which remains as ambivalent as their corpses.

Will Lampton, as his friends called him, did not enjoy doing "usual things in the usual sort way" (as the portrait of him circa 1914 above would indicate). Such was also the case with his poetry: His lines have varying syllables lengths (for the most part; a few are more conventional), often short, with a bounce that pushes the reader forward while challenging them to read carefully. As one critic noted them, they are "peculiar, perpendicularly elongated." Lampton writes about subjects as varied as George Washington, domestic news, the landscape of Kentucky, and a love of pie. He makes frequent use of alliteration, internal rhyme, and repetition in a way that adds to the comical nature of his work. Most importantly, Lampton frequently uses grandiose language for menial topics like hedge hogs and humidity, mixed with more common vernacular from "wow" to "whoop-la!"

Wilkins Freeman: serious and self-restrained

"These little stories were written about the village people of New England." So begins the preface to A Far-Away Melody and Other Stories, a new edition of the works of Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman. The book, in fact, was a slimmer version of her previous collection A Humble Romance and Other Stories. In her preface, dated December 5, 1889, Freeman (or, more accurately, Wilkins, as she was not yet married) emphasized the old-fashioned nature of her New England tales. Those people, after all, are "the descendants of the Massachusetts Bay colonists, in whom can still be seen traces of those features of will and conscience, so strong as to be almost exaggerations and deformities, which characterised their ancestors."

Wilkins notes that writing down these stories were an effort to preserve them as the younger generations are less and less like their ancestors, whom she calls "serious and self-restrained." In addition to the title story, the collection published in Ireland included a Christmas story, "A Moral Exigency." In that tale, the main character is Eunice Fairweather, the 25-year old daughter of a poor minister. That connection left her with certain social obligations, particularly around the holidays, which she loyally followed despite occasional weariness and boredom of those tasks.

Eunice was not pretty but she was pious. She considered her appearance, her simple home, and her lot in life "with a sort of resigned disapproval." She did what was expected her as a minister's daughter but neither enjoyed it nor tried to avoid it. The same was, to some extent, true of a local clergyman, Mr. Wilson, who had previously been a romantic man before the death of his wife. Now a widower with a household of children, he sought out a practical solution: find a new wife to assist him. It was not for love that he asked the minister for the hand of Eunice Fairweather. When her father tells her this, she acknowledges that he would make a fine husband but admits, "I think I would rather remain as I am, father."

Eunice asks for a week to consider the offer. In the days that followed, something quite unexpected happens: the wealthy, good-looking Burr Mason seems smitten by Eunice, despite his engagement to the lovely Ada Harris. Burr speaks of marriage to her, and Ada falls into a fit of jealousy and rage:

There is no excuse for you: you knew it. It is no better for him. You have encouraged him in being false. You have dragged him down. You are a plainer girl than I, and a soberer one, but you are no better. You will not make him a better wife. You cannot make him a good wife after this. It is all for yourself — yourself!"

Throughout the story, Eunice seems to drift through her own life, ambivalent of the course she is following (as Leah Blatt Glasner notes, "a mixture of fiery rebel and dutiful slave"). In the end, she gives up her connection to Burr Mason, leaving him for Ada. The ambiguous ending of the story leaves the reader asking, however, does Eunice return to Mr. Wilson? Or does she choose the spinster life? And is either an improvement on the other?

Garland and Whitman: endlessly rocking

Hamlin Garland had disobeyed doctor's orders — not his doctor, but that of Walt Whitman. When Garland visited the aging poet at his home in New Jersey, his health was so poor that Garland was asked to stay no more than two minutes. But the Wisconsin-born author and educator, who was then living in Massachusetts, stayed for a half an hour.

Garland was enamored with Whitman and his work. Back in Waltham, Massachusetts, he started a series of classes on Whitman attended by 40 ladies. On November 9, 1888, he wrote of that class to the poet:

I talked last night to my Waltham class (of forty ladies) about your work and read to them. I wish you could have seen how deeply attentive they were and how moved by "Out of the Cradle" "To Think of Time" "Sparkles from the Wheel" and others. Many of them will now read your works carefully and understandingly.

Garland, a poet himself, particularly recommended that readers start with Specimen Days because reading his prose, he said, would prepare them to "sympathize" with his poetic views. Garland also noted he intended to write a review of November Boughs. True to his word, Garland's review was published in the Boston Evening Transcript only a week after his letter. Of course, Garland remembered Whitman's poor health and, as such, he concluded his letter with concern:  "It rejoices me to hear you are gaining [e.g. recovering]. I hope the winter will not be too severe for you — though I believe you stand the cold better than the heat." From the first poem Garland mentioned his students loved:

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
Down from the shower'd halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous'd words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

Edward Rowland Sill: like a fly on a pin

When Edward Rowland Sill heard that the well-known and highly-respected editor Edmund Clarence Stedman intended to include him in a book of poetry, he was hesitant. On October 13, 1885, he wrote to their mutual friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich:

Can you not tell Mr. Stedman (if his book is not yet beyond proofcorrecting) that one, at least, of the "twilight" poets, namely, "Sill," would much prefer to be left out of his enumeration? He had me in his "Century " article. I am not a publishing author (the booklet of verses of which I think I sent you a copy — "The Venus of Milo," etc., was never published, and never will be), and so might escape being stuck in his catalogue, like a fly on a pin. Don't you think?

Sill, Connecticut-born but widely-traveled, apparently refused to call himself an author or, perhaps more likely, refused to live up to the scrutiny of national exposure which Stedman's book would have drawn. Sill was not exaggerating. At the time of his letter, he had only published one book — a translation of another person's book. The manuscript he had shown Stedman was intended only for his friends, never for publication. He claimed many of his poems — "the confounded little things" he burned in manuscript. He died two years later, having never published a book. The poem he mentioned to Aldrich, however, "The Venus of Milo," was collected posthumously. From that poem:

  Before the broken marble, on a day,
There came a worshiper: a slanted ray
Struck in across the dimness of her shrine
And touched her face as to a smile divine;
For it was like the worship of a Greek
At her old altar. Thus I heard him speak: —

  Men call thee Love: is there no holier name
Than hers, the foam-born, laughter-loving dame?
Nay, for there is than love no holier name:
All words that pass the lips of mortal men
With inner and with outer meaning shine;
An outer gleam that meets the common ken,
An inner light that but the few divine.

Thou art the love celestial, seeking still
The soul beneath the form; the serene will;
The wisdom, of whose deeps the sages dream;
The unseen beauty that doth faintly gleam
In stars, and flowers, and waters where they roll;
The unheard music whose faint echoes even
Make whosoever hears a homesick soul
Thereafter, till he follow it to heaven.

Ultimately, Sill received only a passing comment, and not even his full name, in Stedman's book, which turned out to be a much more significant undertaking than a mere compilation. Stedman, in fact, produced a massive, all-encompassing, running catalogue of American poetry. Poets of America (1885) was meant to prove the important role that poetry played in defining American cultural and intellectual development. The book was a sort of historic record which meant to add to the more typical record of politics and war that end up in history books. Stedman believed that, with the advancement of the United States in general, with its power and wealth in particular, one would see it best reflected in its imaginative creations, with poetry as "its highest forms of expression." After all, he said, "The song of a nation is accepted as an ultimate test of the popular spirit."

Death of Cooke: the writer of the South

John Esten Cooke died of typhoid fever at his Virginia home on September 27, 1886. He was 55 years old. Cooke, like his brother of Philip Pendleton Cooke, became a lawyer but also pursued writing as a hobby. Eventually, shortly after his father's death, he abandoned his law practice entirely to focus on writing. His literary work paused during the Civil War, however. "I can't compose," he admitted, "I can't think of anything but Virginia's degradation." He served as a militia man and, soon, an officer, working with major Confederate names like J. E. B. Stuart and others. He didn't stop writing entirely, however, and occasionally offered dispatches from the war front.

After the war, Cooke resumed his fiction writing, often focused on detailing the Southern experience. Before the war, many of his writings were set in colonial times; after the war, they were almost exclusively set in war time. Perhaps more importantly, he had been somewhat liberal and reform-minded before the war. After, he conformed to certain standards for Southern writers in the hopes of achieving significant commercial success. As he admitted, his intention was "to become the writer of the South yet!" To that end, his version of the Southern experience was bucolic, full of myth, and sometimes antagonistic to the north.

By the end of his life, he had published more than 30 books. Among those books are historical romances, biography (including one of Robert E. Lee and another of "Stonewall" Jackson, and collections of short stories. In more recent years, an organization has named a fiction prize in Cooke's honor; it is granted to books on the Civil War or Southern heritage. From Cooke's 1867 novel Wearing the Gray:

Of all human faculties, surely the most curious is the memory. Capricious, whimsical, illogical, acting ever in accordance with its own wild will, it loses so many "important events" to retain the veriest trifles in its deathless clutch. Ask a soldier who has fought all day long in some world-losing battle, what he remembers most vividly, and he will tell you that he has well-nigh forgotten the most desperate charges, but recalls with perfect distinctness the joy he experienced in swallowing a mouthful of water from the canteen on the body of a dead enemy.

Death of Lanier: The day being done

Sidney Lanier contracted the tuberculosis that would kill him while in a military prison during the Civil War. Even so, he spent the next several years enjoying his life: he became an educator and a musician, then he passed the bar and became a lawyer, married, and published poems and even a novel. He traveled to or lived in Maryland, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, hoping to find a cure for his illness. He never did, and Lanier died in North Carolina on September 7, 1881; he was 39 years old.

Lanier's grave in Baltimore, MD

In his last year, Lanier had taken a job at Johns Hopkins University (his friends and colleagues there hosted a memorial about a month after his death). Notes for his lectures were dictated in strained whispers to his wife. Allegedly, students worried that their lecturer would die mid-lecture. In this same period, he also completed his final poem, "Sunrise," which one critic called "his masterpiece, radiant with beauty, and strong with the spiritual strength which outbraves death." As his wife noted, the poem was written "while his sun of life seemed fairly at the setting, and the and which first pencilled its lines had not strength to carry nourishment to the lips."

"Sunrise" is a fairly lengthy poem written in a conversational yet bouncing meter akin to Walt Whitman. In it, Lanier celebrates his connection to natural world around him. He particularly calls out the trees and their leaves at night:

    Teach me the terms of silence, — preach me
    The passion of patience, — sift me, — impeach me, —
            And there, oh there
As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air,
            Pray me a myriad prayer.

The poem continues in a passionate, almost frenzied, series of observations, questions, and exasperated pleas for answers. The sun is slowly rising throughout, and Lanier combines his poetic sentiments with his sincere belief in the connection between verse and musicality. "I am lit with the Sun," he says, and those words now mark his grave in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery. The poem picks up pace, almost feeling like a symphony as it draws to its conclusion, with the all-powerful, almost godlike sun:

Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas
        Of traffic shall hide thee,
Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories
                        Hide thee,
Never the reek of the time's fen-politics
                        Hide thee,
And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee,
And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee,
        Labor, at leisure, in art,— till yonder beside thee
           My soul shall float, friend Sun,—
              The day being done.

Nye's 'Baled Hay': really no excuse

"There can really be no excuse for this last book of trite and beautiful sayings," wrote Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye in the preface to the third volume of his book Baled Hay. In this preface, dated September 5, 1883, from Hudson, Wisconsin, he admits that he will not palliate the "wrong" of its publication — even if he "had an idea what palliate meant." These short pieces, he reminds us, are absolutely prose: "I have taken great care to thoroughly eradicate anything that would have the appearance of poetry."

Nye, a humorist, offers a series of short, funny sketches filled with uproariously clever one-liners and punch lines. In one titled "The Decline of American Humor," he writes of how an editor declined an essay about American Humor (the joke goes by fast, he actually ends by asking Sabe?). Some are as short as a half a page, some even are only two sentences, and many are illustrated thanks to Frederick Burr Opper of Puck magazine, and some are about contemporary topics (one pokes fun at Western author Joaquin Miller). Most were reprintings from Nye's newspaper Boomerang based in Laramie, Wyoming. One, titled "About Saw Mills," features a hilariously gory scene (with illustration):

At one of these mills, not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage, and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute. The saw took a large chew of tobacco from the plug he had in his pistol pocket, and then began on him.

But there's no use going into details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the sawdust and put him in a nail keg and carried him away, but he did not speak again. Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him, or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him, no one ever knew.

The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.

We should learn from this never to lean on the buzz saw when it moveth itself aright.

Concerned about the safety of his readers, however, Nye asks that the book be read in small parts. "If you read it all at once, and it gives you the heaves, I am glad of it, and you deserve it," his preface concludes. "I will not bind myself to write the obituary of such people."

The noblest work by woman done

Former Massachusetts governor and member of the House of Representatives William Claflin invited people to a garden party at his home in Newtonville, Massachusetts to celebrate the 70th birthday of Harriet Beecher Stowe. For that special occasion, held June 14, 1882 (actually her 71st), fellow anti-slavery writer John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem, "A Greeting":

Thrice welcome from the Land of Flowers
And golden-fruited orange bowers
To this sweet, green-turfed June of ours!
To her who, in our evil time,
Dragged into light the nation's crime
With strength beyond the strength of men,
And, mightier than their swords, her pen!
To her who world-wide entrance gave
To the log-cabin of the slave;
Made all his wrongs and sorrows known,
And all earth's languages his own, —
North, South, and East and West, made all
The common air electrical,
Until the o'ercharged bolts of heaven
Blazed down, and every chain was riven!

Like Stowe, Whittier had also used his pen in the war against slavery, composing several poems for the cause and also editing an abolitionist newspaper. Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin had become the highest selling novel of the generation and was cited as a major factor in unifying northerners against slavery. But Whittier's poem also praises her other works; he mentioned several of her "fireside stories, grave or gay," including Oldtown Folks. He continues:

To her at threescore years and ten
Be tributes of the tongue and pen;
Be honor, praise, and heart-thanks given,
The loves of earth, the hopes of heaven!

Ah, dearer than the praise that stirs
The air to-day, our love is hers!
She needs no guaranty of fame
Whose own is linked with Freedom's name.
Long ages after ours shall keep
Her memory living while we sleep;
The waves that wash our gray coast lines,
The winds that rock the Southern pines,
Shall sing of her; the unending years
Shall tell her tale in unborn ears.
And when, with sins and follies past,
Are numbered color-hate and caste,
White, black, and red shall own as one
The noblest work by woman done.

Cable: Do everything cheerfully

Cable in 1915

Novelist George Washington Cable was with the Union Club in Boston when he wrote home to his oldest son in New Orleans on June 10, 1881, offering his insight on good living (and a few specific commands for his daughters):

I must send you a line for your own dear self. I am anxious to hear from you as well as from sweet mother, and I hope I may get a word or two from your own hand.

I could not in a whole hour tell you all the things I have seen since we parted. But I can say that all the time I saw the beauties of land or sea or hill or valley, whether nature's work or man's, I was still thinking of my beloved ones far away on the mountains.

Yet I did not fret, for I know that the Good Shepherd keeps my little flock, and my prayer is that their souls may be precious in His sight. I pray that they may be sweet, gentle, obedient children, trying to do their parents' will before the parents have to express it.

Be careful to help each other. Be amiable each to each. Remember in everything you do you are serving God. Do everything cheerfully—gladly.

Tell Mary not to tease and to keep her face at least half clean.

Tell Lucy I wish I had her here now with a little salt and pepper and mustard. I would eat her for dinner.

Tell Margaret not to forget her breakfast in the morning, her dinner afterwards, nor her supper in the evening. Tell her not to be cross to Lucy and to mind mother as well as sister Louise.

Now, form in procession and each kiss mother as you pass by.

Here are four kisses for four sweet girls and four for their dear mother.

Cable began to feel uncomfortable in his native South as he wrote a series of controversial essays on Civil Rights. He eventually moved with his family to Northampton, Massachusetts, only a few years after this letter was written.