Birth of Dawson: if my hand may hold the pen

Daniel L. Dawson was born in Lewiston, Pennsylvania on December 17, 1856. As an adult, he began contributing original poems to the Philadelphia-based Lippincott's Magazine; these contributions were eventually collected in The Seeker in the Marshes; and Other Poems (1893). Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel, effused praise for the book, calling Dawson "one of the truest, most inevitable poets of this age. His poems are intensely lyrical and of permanent worth." He further compared him to Walt Whitman.

Much of his writing reflected his interest in mythology and folklore — to the chagrin of one reviewer for the Methodist Review, who accused Dawson of paganism and that paganism, in turn, was "fatal" to the creating of literature. The reviewer noted that the poet "had been intimate with various heathen divinities of doubtful reputation; but we judge from his poetry that he did not know Christ even when he saw him." Further, he said, if Dawson, a perpetual bachelor, was in any way comparable to Whitman, it was because both men had a similar "animality, not so healthy and well-kept."

Even so, Dawson was fairly prolific as a poet and, further, was extremely athletic, tall, and well-built — as one critic noted, "little looked the poet he was." One friend said he had never known a "manlier man" than Dawson. His poem "To-day and To-morrow" was, presumably, written about the time of his 30th birthday (he died at age 38):

Sometime when the sun is fair and warm
       And blue and bright on a summer's day,
That is, if I fall not in any harm,
       I shall write some things I have wished to say;
That is, if my hand may hold the pen,
I will say some things for the ears of men.

But I fear sometimes that a little pain
       Will come in this weary heart of mine;
Or peace like night on my tangled brain;
       Or the lungs cease drinking the air like wine,
And blood flow over these pallid lips
And cloud the life in a red eclipse.

For a score and ten are treble a score,
       The price we pay is dear for the years;
The wisdom that falls to thirty or more
       Is purchased by travail and change and tears;
We look and learn with larger scope,
But the price we pay for this is—hope.

And so would I fain myself deceive,
       As well as I may in my lonely room,
When the shadows are falling over the eve,
       And night is coming with cloud and gloom,
In hope that much is mine to say,
Though I know to-morrow is only to-day.

Birth of Paulding: homebred feeling

James Kirke Paulding's main goal in literature was to promote the United States, its history, its people, and its ideals. "Mr. Paulding's writings are distinguished for a decided nationality," summed up one contemporary editor, who noted all his characters were distinctly American.

Born in Dutchess County in New York on August 22, 1778, he was the son of William Paulding, who had assisted financially with the American Revolution. Another family member was involved with the capture of John André. His first literary effort, however, was less lofty: "in a frolicsome mood" he joined with his friend Washington Irving to produce the satirical Salmagundi (beginning in 1807). That humorous periodical, however, laid the groundwork for his more purposeful satire, The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan during a period in which English critics were particularly harsh in commenting on American culture (Paulding's personification of Great Britain had "a devilish, quarrelsome, overbearing disposition, which was always getting him into some scrape or other").

In fact, Paulding began experimenting with a variety of literary forms: satire, poetry, novels, drama, and biography. Perhaps because he was writing so early in American literary history, at a time without significant competition, he became fairly well known as a man of letters. He was also named Secretary of the Navy in 1838.

Nineteenth century critics seemed truly to admire Paulding, in part because of his connection to Irving. One contemporary noted "his affection for the democratical institutions of his country" was easily seen in his work and, further, his writing style was not "polished" but expressed "boldly and carelessly, without paying too nice a regard to the decrees of taste, and the canons of criticism." Some accounts suggest he never modified his rough drafts or preplanned his plots, preferring spontaneity in his work.

Perhaps that lack of polish explains the excessive length of his ambitious poem The Backwoodsman (1818), an early rallying cry for Americanism in literature. As he says in his preface, his hope was to invite young authors to focus their attentions to home and the United States. He cast away the legendary writers of the past like Homer, who represented an uncivilized age. Following this "humble theme" of nationalism, the poem evokes the landscape, history, and character of the United States as a source of literary inspiration. Further, though Paulding admits that art and poetry have not been the focus in this new country, he looks forward to the day when American culture overtakes European culture as superior:

Neglected Muse! of this our western clime,
How long in servile, imitative rhyme,
Wilt thou thy stifled energies impart,
And miss the path that leads to every heart?
How long repress the brave decisive flight,
Warm'd by thy native fires, led by thy native light?
Thrice happy he who first shall strike the lyre,
With homebred feeling, and with homebred fire;
He need not envy any favour'd bard,
Who Fame's bright meed, and Fortune's smiles reward;
Secure, that wheresoe'er this empire rolls,
Or east, or west, or tow'rd the firm fixed poles,
While Europe's ancient honours fade away,
And sink the glories of her better day,

Birth of Goodrich: instead of wickedness

In the western part of the State of Connecticut, is a small town by the name of Ridgefield. This title is descriptive, and indicates the general form and position of the place. It is, in fact, a collection of hills, rolled into one general and commanding elevation. On the west is a ridge of mountains, forming the boundary between the States of Connecticut and New York; to the south the land spreads out in wooded undulations to Long Island Sound; east and north, a succession of hills, some rising up against the sky, and others fading away in the distance, bound the horizon. In this town, in an antiquated and rather dilapidated house of shingles and clapboards, I was born on the 19th of August, 1793.

Thus Samuel Griswold Goodrich explains his own birth on August 19, 1793, in his Recollections of a Lifetime (1857). He was one of ten children (only eight of whom survived past infancy) and was raised in near poverty. His father, a minister, made only $400 a year. As such, young Goodrich was mostly self-educated. He later became a bookseller and publisher.

In the literary world, Goodrich is perhaps most well-known for founding and editing the annual gift book The Token — which published the writings of Nathaniel Parker Willis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others — as well as the Peter Parley series of educational anecdotes for children. Peter Parley's book featured an elderly gentleman telling stories about history, geography, biography, science, and other miscellaneous topics. The series proved both popular and lucrative; he later recalled his optimism: "Well, thought I, if this goes on I may yet rival Mother Goose!"

Goodrich's self-education proved his greatest inspiration for the future. As a boy, he read Robinson Crusoe, the Bible, natural history, and biographies. Looking back as an adult, he believed it was all a positive influence on him. It was through this background, he writes,

...that I first formed the conception of the Parley Tales— the general idea of which was to make nursery books reasonable and truthful, and thus to feed the young mind upon things wholesome and pure, instead of things monstrous, false, and pestilent: that we should use the same prudence in giving aliment to the mind and soul, as to the body; and as we would not give blood and poison as food for the latter, we should not administer cruelty and violence, terror and impurity, to the other. In short, that the elements of nursery books should consist of beauty instead of deformity, goodness instead of wickedness, decency instead of vulgarity.

Birth of Tarkington: content with their own

Although he was given the name "Newton" (after an uncle, who was governor of California) when he was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on July 29, 1869, he became better known by his middle name as Booth Tarkington. By the end of his life, Tarkington was a prolific novelist, short story writer, playwright, and even an illustrator, with two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction under his belt as well as a handful of honorary degrees.

An early biography of Tarkington noted that his early years and young adulthood were unlike many other writers: He was not born into poverty, nor did he struggle to make a living before being forced to use his pen to earn his bread. His father was a judge and, as a boy, young "Tark" was sent to a boarding school in New Hampshire. After two years at Purdue University, he graduated from Princeton University. A few years later, in 1899, Tarkington published his first book, A Gentleman from Indiana. It was printed as a serial in McClure's Magazine. It proved successful and was soon staged as a play.

This success was despite Willa Cather's opinion of it as "so amateurish that it will scarcely be seriously considered among literary people — outside of Indiana — and his view of life is so shallow and puerile and sophomorically sugary that grown-ups will have little patience with it." In defense of Tarkington, the book was serialized at a time when local color writing was extremely popular. Further, the founder of McClure's Magazine was Samuel S. McClure, who had been raised partly in Indiana. Tarkington's description of a slow-paced Midwestern town was likely part of the appeal. The book opens:

There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travellers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape lies interminably level: bleak in winter, a desolate plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in summer, in its flat lonesomeness, miles on miles with not one cool hill slope away from the sun. The persistent tourist who seeks for signs of man in this sad expanse perceives a reckless amount of rail fence; at intervals a large barn; and, here and there, man himself, incurious, patient, slow, looking up from the fields apathetically as the Limited flies by. Widely separated from each other are small frame railway stations—sometimes with no other building in sight, which indicates that somewhere behind the adjacent woods a few shanties and thin cottages are grouped about a couple of brick stores...

Only one street attained to the dignity of a name—Main Street, which formed the north side of the Square... In winter, Main Street was a series of frozen gorges and hummocks; in fall and spring, a river of mud; in summer, a continuing dust heap; it was the best street in Plattville.

The people lived happily; and, while the world whirled on outside, they were content with their own.

Birth of Lazarus: world-wide welcome

Emma Lazarus, her sister said years later, was born to sing like a poet. But, she noted, "she did not sing, like a bird, for joy of being alive." Instead, much of her work is very serious, if not somber; much of it is political. Lazarus was born on July 22, 1849, the fourth of what would soon be seven children, in New York City.

Though Lazarus wrote many poems beginning as a teenager, as well as prose and even drama, before her death at age 38, she is best known for a single sonnet. It was written in 1883 and donated to be sold to raise money for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. She believed that the Statue would serve as an important greeting and a symbol for incoming immigrants, and likely had that in mind when she wrote "The New Colossus," referencing the ancient Greek Colossus of Rhodes. It was read at the fundraising exhibition, but was mostly forgotten until after Lazarus's death. By 1903, a plaque quoting Lazarus's poem was added to the pedestal. Her words remain a reminder of a certain idealism in emigration to the United States:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Birth of Ida B. Wells: with its joys and sorrows

Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862. Before she was even a year old, however, she was emancipated by Abraham Lincoln. Her parents, who were also freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, encouraged education in their children (her father was a trustee of what is now Rust College). However, her parents died when she was a teenager, and young Ida dropped out of college to became a schoolteacher in order to earn enough money to support her siblings.

Wells eventually moved the family to Tennessee, and there experienced segregation and the effects of racism stronger than before. In September 1883, she refused to move from the first class cabin of the train to the smokers' cabin. Though she won a lawsuit against the company, she lost on a later appeal. She sued again after a similar incident and again won initially but, this time, it was the state's supreme court that overturned the verdict.

The incidents fueled her desire to do something to attack the problem of racism and she soon switched careers from educator to journalist. She wrote for newspapers in Tennessee, New York, Michigan, Illinois, and others, writing directly about racial problems including poor funding for black schools and the horror of lynchings. She was soon labeled a troublemaker; others, however, called her "Princess of the Press." Eventually, she was owner and editor of her own newspaper, Free Speech. Once, in 1892, while away from the office, her building was ransacked by her enemies. She was undeterred, and Ida B. Wells had a lengthy career as a journalist, author, and public speaker.

An entry from her diary on her 25th birthday, July 16, 1887, shows the high standards she set for herself even at that young age:

This morning I stand face to face with twenty five years of life, that ere the day is gone will have passed me by forever. The experiences of a quarter of a century of life are my own, beginning with this, for me, new year... Within the last ten [years] I have suffered more, learned more, lost more than I ever expect to, again. In the last decade, I've only begun to live — to know life as a whole with its joys and sorrows. Today I write these lines with a heart overflowing with thankfulness to My Heavenly Father for His wonderful love & kindness... When I turn to sum up my own accomplishments I am not so well pleased. I have not used the opportunities I had to my best advantage and find myself intellectually lacking... Twenty-five years old today! May another 10 years find me increased in honesty & purity of purpose & motive!

*Information, including the passage above, comes from The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1994 edition), edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis.

Birth of Charles Heber Clark (Max Adeler)

Charles Heber Clark was born in Berlin, Maryland on July 11, 1842, though he moved to Pennsylvania as a teenager and later became known by his pseudonym "Max Adeler." After serving as a soldier for the Union Army during the Civil War, he began his writing career as a journalist in Philadelphia. Much of his work was focused on economics. He eventually owned and edited his own newspaper, the Textile Record, before retiring to the suburbs of Conshohocken, outside of Philadelphia.

His first book was as a humorist, Out of the Hurly Burly; or, Life in an Odd Corner (1874), using the pen name Max Adeler to disassociate with his serious journalism. It was dedicated to "the intelligent compositor," the machine that laid out the type, for being "a humorist who has had too little fame" thanks to its occasional typos. The book reportedly sold over a million copies. Several other books with humorous intent followed, though Clark also attempted more serious writing. He and Mark Twain had a spat or two over their literary borrowings, both intentional and unintentional.

A representative selection from Out of the Hurly Burly offers a glimpse into Clark's/Adeler's casual humor. In this section, he is writing about umbrellas and their various uses as well as how umbrellas are perceived by certain people. He offers, for example, a story about a soldier who went into battle in the rain with an umbrella. "I do not mind being killed," he said, "but I object decidedly to getting wet." The following account is offered immediately after:

And there was the case of Colonel Coombs — Coombs of Colorado. He had heard that the most ferocious wild beast could be frightened and put to flight if an umbrella should suddenly be opened in its face, and he determined to test the matter at the earliest opportunity. One day, while walking in the woods, Coombs perceived a panther crouching, preparatory to making a spring at him. Coombs held his umbrella firmly in his hand, and presenting it at the panther, unfurled it. The result was not wholly satisfactory, for the next moment the animal leaped upon the umbrella, flattened it out and began to lunch upon Coombs. Not only did the beast eat that anxious inquirer after truth, but it swallowed the hooked handle of the umbrella, which was held tightly in Coombs's grasp, and for two or three weeks it wandered about with its nose buried among the ribs of the umbrella. It was very handy when there there was rain, but it obstructed the animal's vision, and consequently it walked into town and was killed.

Birth of Humphreys: wonderful at imitation

David Humphreys was born in Connecticut on July 10, 1752. A graduate of Yale, he served during the American Revolution, earning the rank of Colonel. Most notably, he also became an aide-de-camp of George Washington, who praised him for his "zeal in the cause of his country." When Washington became President of the United States, Humphreys was appointed as an overseas diplomat. He later wrote a biography of his friend Washington. In his varied career, Humphreys was also a farmer, a legislator, and an entrepreneur, as well as a poet and author. Without further ado, his poem, "The Monkey Who Shaved Himself and His Friends: A Fable" (from 1804, if not earlier):

    A man who own'd a barber's shop
At York, and shav'd full many a fop,
A monkey kept for their amusement;
He made no other kind of use on't—
This monkey took great observation,
Was wonderful at imitation,
And all he saw the barber do,
He mimic'd straight, and did it too.

    It chanc'd in shop, the dog and cat,
While friseur din'd, demurely sat,
Jacko found nought to play the knave in,
So thought he'd try his hand at shaving.
Around the shop in haste he rushes,
And gets the razors, soap, and brushes;
Now puss he fix'd (no muscle miss stirs)
And lather'd well her beard and whiskers,
Then gave a gash, as he began—
The cat cry'd "waugh!" and off she ran.

    Next Towser's beard he try'd his skill in,
Though Towser seem'd somewhat unwilling;
As badly here again succeeding,
The dog runs howling round, and bleeding.

    Nor yet was tir'd our roguish elf;
He'd seen the barber shave himself;
So by the glass, upon the table,
He rubs with soap his visage sable,
Then with left hand holds smooth his jaw,—
The razor in his dexter paw;
 Around he flourishes and slashes,
Till all his face is seam'd with gashes.
His cheeks dispatch'd—his visage thin
He cock'd, to shave beneath his chin;
 Drew razor swift as he could pull it,
 And cut, from ear to ear, his gullet.

MORAL.
    Who cannot write, yet handle pens,
Are apt to hurt themselves and friends.
Though others use them well, yet fools
Should never meddle with edge tools.

Humphreys's poem was obviously meant to be humorous and his comedic poems put him amidst the group called "The Hartford Wits" — a group which included other early Connecticut writers like John Trumbull and Joel Barlow. As for "The Monkey," the poem was almost certainly an inspiration to Edgar Allan Poe, who gave the razor-wielding idea a more homicidal turn in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Charles H. Crandall: silver-harnessed stars

Courtesy: Stamford
Historical Society

"One must needs be in a rarely appreciative mood fully to enjoy the privilege of listening to an old violin that bears the autograph inscription of Antonius Stradivarius," theorized Charles Henry Crandall. But, when those moods of appreciation strike, "one should approach the consideration of a gem in the domain of literature which has outlasted seven centuries." Crandall, born in Greenwich, New York on June 19, 1858, was referring particularly to the sonnet, a poetic form to which he dedicated his first book Representative Sonnets by American Poets (1890). The title was limiting, as he also included various sonneteers from around the world.

Crandall began his publishing career as a journalist for newspapers including the New York Tribune. In 1886, however, his poor health inspired a move to Connecticut. It was here that he began publishing more literary works, rather than journalistic ones. After his anthology of sonnets, he published his own poetry in Wayside Music: Lyrics, Songs and Sonnets (1893) and The Chords of Life (1898). He published several more books until he committed suicide in 1923 at age 64.

Crandall's poem "Each Day" from Wayside Music:

I watch the sun at morning, and it shines with all the gladness
  Of the million million happy eyes that greet its glorious birth.
I gaze again at evening, and it gives back all the sadness
  Of the million million weary eyes that watch it sink to earth.

And his poem "The Poet" from The Chords of Life:

I am not young, I am not old,
    For Time has fled before me;
All gates before my touch unfold,
    Transparent skies are o'er me.

I gaze in maiden's eyes, and ken
    Their never-uttered speech;
I look into the souls of men
    Deeper than they can reach.

The sun each morn I link anew
    Unto my kingly cars;
Each evening drive through realms of blue
    My silver-harnessed stars.

My spirit speaks, and birds and bees
    Obey my slightest will;
And silent things break out in speech,
    And noisy things are still.

No noble thing escapes my love,
    All maidens pure are mine,
And ever round me, from above,
    The rays of beauty shine.

Birth of Anna Pierpont Siviter: such running

Francis Harrison Pierpont was known as the "Father of West Virginia" for his toil advocating for the new state split from Virginia. He served as the first provisional governor of those counties in west Virginia who did not side with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Before all that, however, he was a father. In particular, his daughter was born on April 14, 1858, in what was then Fairmont, Virginia, now part of West Virginia. After her marriage in 1886, she was known as the author Anna Pierpont Siviter (pictured here at age 8).

Young Anna went to school in southwestern Pennsylvania at the Washington Female Seminary (the same institution earlier attended by Rebecca Harding Davis). Her husband was the editor of a newspaper in Pittsburgh and an occasional humor writer; she began contributing both poetry and prose to various periodicals as well. She also edited several publications for use in Sunday schools. Possibly her most popular work in her lifetime was the book Nehe, a Tale of the Times of Artaxerxes (1901), a tale set in Persia inspired by the Biblical Nehemiah, and dedicated to her famous father. Several years later, when her father was honored with a statue in the Capitol in Washington, D.C. (pictured at left), she wrote a poem for its unveiling which was presented by her daughter. The poem was less of a highlight of her father the governor, and more of an ode to West Virginia itself, including this stanza:

In the shout and din of battle, she was born, the brave, free State;
Humble men stood sponsor for her, but their every deed was great—
West Virginia, child of Freedom, lift your happy head on high;
Truth and Justice are your birthright; you were born to Liberty.

In Pittsburgh, Siviter also worked with several local Red Cross chapters, founded a kindergarten association, was a founding board member of the Pittsburgh Children's Hospital, joined the Daughters of the American Revolution, and various other civic organizations. Among her published books are The Sculptor, and Other Verses, Songs of Hope, Songs Sung Along the Way, and, posthumously, Recollections of War and Peace. She also contributed two recipes for a cook book. Her poem "Doggie and the Burglars" was found in a Wichita newspaper in 1899:

The house was dark and silent
    When Mr. Doggie woke.
"I thought," said Mr. Doggie,
    "For sure that some one spoke.

"I think," said Mr. Doggie,
    "That I will take a walk.
It's very trying in the night
    To think that you hear talk.

"Let's see," said Mr. Doggie;
    "My master's gun I'll take.
I do not mean to use it,
    But for appearance sake."

So forth went Mr. Doggie,
    And how he bowwowed when,
Just getting in the window,
    He found two robber men.

And when the thieves saw coming
    That big dog and his gun
You never saw such running
    As those scared men did run.

*Note: I had difficulty confirming the birth date of Anna Siviter; some sources list her birth year as 1859, only one offered the April 14 date. The image of young Anna comes from a booklet produced by Pierpont Community and Technical College.

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.

Birth of Forceythe Willson: faint, white fire

It seemed prophetic that the boy born in Little Genesee, New York, on April 10, 1837 would some day become a poet when he was named Byron. The poetic name notwithstanding, he went by his middle and last name as an adult, Forceythe Willson. He was born in a log cabin in what was then a rural area in far western New York. Soon, however, the Willson family sailed downriver into Kentucky before settling in Indiana. The eight Willson children (including future Kentucky governor Augustus Willson) were orphans by 1859, however, and each received a sizable inheritance.

Forceythe Willson attempted to study at Antioch College in Ohio and at Harvard in Massachusetts. He was unable, however, due to the onset of tuberculosis, which physicians said was immediately terminal. He survived longer than expected, however, and returned to his family in New Albany, Indiana. He married Elizabeth Conwell Smith (herself a poet) and contributed to a journal across the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky. He also wrote poetry, advocated for the Union cause during the Civil War, and dabbled in spiritualism and clairvoyance before finally dying in 1867.

Willson published his only book of poems the year before his death during a temporary sojourn living in Massachusetts. One of Willson's most famous poems, the lengthy "The Old Sergeant," was praised by notable people including Abraham Lincoln, John James Piatt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Willson's poem "Mystic Thought" (which he listed as with the musical term "Arpeggio") shows his unusual use of form as well as his interest in spiritualism:

There came a Mystic Thought to me;
    If any soul should ask me, "Whence?"
I can but say, I could not see,
    Nor hear nor feel, in any sense.
As the glory of the rising moon
Is duplicated in the lagoon,
Or gleams on the old tower and its spire,
Till the cross becomes a cross of fire, —
So that strange Thought, serene and lone,
Rose on my dark soul, and it shone!

Shouldst ask me, if an Angel brought
This strange, this sweet and secret Thought?
I could but say, I do not know!
It came as comes the guiding glow
From Heaven's high shrines; or as the snow
On the dark hill-tops; or as bloom
    The intimations of a God
In every violet of the tomb,
    And every pansy of the sod.

It came, unbidden, — as it went, —
A wingéd, wandering Sentiment,
That for a moment fanned my lyre
With passing wings, of faint, white fire:
Five finger-tips were touched to mine,
Most lightly: and a drop of wine,
Or dew, fell on my lips. At last,
A breath, — a seeming kiss —
                                               it passed!

Birth of Emily Hawthorn: no idle dreamer

Though she sometimes wrote under the pen name "Emily Hawthorn," she was born Emily Thornton on March 21, 1845 in Lafayette, Indiana. After her marriage, she became Emily Thornton Charles. As a teenager, she had been a teacher but, after her husband died in 1874, as often happened among women in the 19th century, she needed to find a way to support herself. As a 24-year old widow and mother of two, she turned to writing.

Charles began writing for publications in Indianapolis and published her first book of poetry, Hawthorn Blossoms, in 1876. She also became a public speaker, often for the cause of woman's suffrage. In 1881, she became managing editor of a Washington D.C.-based newspaper and soon founded The National Veteran in the nation's capital. She became an officer for the National Woman's Press Association and was chosen as a speaker for the World's Fair in 1893. She collapsed at about that time and was bedridden for a year. She took the opportunity to revise her poetry and published Lyrical Poems in 1886.

In the preface to her first book, Charles explained her rewards for writing: touching the emotions of others. If, she wrote, an "expression to the thoughts that throng my mind and the emotions that swell within my heart" met sympathy in a single reader, it would be like "giving voice to those who were dumb." Perhaps her August 1873 poem, "The Poet," offers more on the subject:

My life may scatter sunbeams,
My face be smiling bright;
Yet in my heart there's sadness
That never seeks the light.

My life hath had its sorrows
Like chequered shadows cast;
They ever crossed my pathway,
And will while life shall last.

Some joys erstwhile come to me,
But pleasures never last;
Except in thought they linger—
In memories of the past.

I am no idle dreamer;
I work, I think, I feel.
Who chides me if, in rhyming,
I may my thoughts reveal?

Some heavy-laden mortal,
Who bows beneath his load,
Perhaps in reading my thoughts
May firmer tread the road.

'Tis idle all repining;
Look up, be brave, be true:
Who knows but in the future
Some brightness beams for you?

Thus, while on earth I linger,
I'll send forth words of cheer;
For this, who knows, but may be
My destined life-work here.

Birth of Lucas: tribute of love from me

When Daniel Bedinger Lucas was born there on March 16, 1836, the town of Charles Town was part of Virginia; today it is part of West Virginia, which legally separated into its own state during the Civil War. During that conflict, Lucas, a lawyer who studied at the University of Virginia as well as what was then called Washington College, sided forcefully with the Confederacy, a loyalty he often celebrated through his poetry. During the war, he attempted to rescue a friend who was to be executed as a spy, John Yates Beall. Lucas was unsuccessful and was unable to return to Virginia and instead hid out in Canada.

Upon his return to his family home, Rion Hall, where he was born, his home state had become West Virginia and he was barred from practicing law until he finally offered his oath to the Union in 1870. It was said that Lucas got his poetic sensibility, at least in part, from the picturesque surroundings of rural western Virginia where he was born and grew up. If that is the case, perhaps no better poem can be included her than his "My Heart is in the Mountains":

Right nobly flows the River James
   From Richmond to the Sea,
And many a hallowed mem'ry claims,
   And tribute of love from me;
But Western Tempe farther on—
   Mother of limestone fountains!
My heart goes back with the setting sun—
   My heart, my heart is in the Mountains!

There where the fringe-tree nods his plume,
   Beneath the white pine's shade—
There where the laurel drops his bloom
   O'er many a wild cascade—
There where the eagle seeks his nest—
   Mother of limestone fountains!
List to an exile's prayer for rest—
   My heart, my heart is in the Mountains!

The wide expanse of the boundless sea
   Is a sight to stir the soul,
And there is a breadth of majesty
   In the Western prairie's roll—
But give me the heights that milk the clouds,
   And gather the dew in fountains!
Give me the peaks, with their misty shrouds—
   My heart, my heart is in the Mountains!

There's something blank in the landscape here
   And tame in the water's flow—
I pine for a mountain atmosphere,
   And a crag in the sunset's glow!
King of the Hills! Blue Ridge that I love!
   Feed still the Vale with fountains,
From rock and dale, and mountain-cove—
   My heart, my heart is in the Mountains!

Birth of Cranch: Nature is but a scroll

Christopher Pearse Cranch was born on March 8, 1813, in what is now Alexandria, Virginia, the youngest son of 13 children. As he recalled many years later, "My first recollections date from the house in Washington Street, when I was about four or five years old." Not all of those recollections were positive. He remembered one of his teachers as "a great tyrant" known for "devising all sorts of strange, an sometimes cruel, punishments for the boys. Two of his sisters died when Christopher was young. "The death of these two elder sisters were my first great griefs, and made a deep impression on me."

Cranch's father, William Cranch, was appointed by President John Adams to the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia as an assistant judge (later to promoted as chief judge by Thomas Jefferson) before the boy's birth. Like Adams, the Cranch family also owned and operated a farm. After graduating from a college in D.C., Christopher Pearse Cranch made his way to Harvard Divinity School, after which he became influenced by the new liberal theology known as Transcendentalism.

Cranch's career was divided as a preacher, an artist, and as an author, editor, and poet. He lived for 78 years, almost to the very end of the century, outliving many of his fellow Transcendentalists. Perhaps his greatest poem is also one of his earliest — and his most Transcendental. "Correspondences" was originally published in The Dial in January 1841. In it, Cranch shows a "correspondence" with a Nature that represents the deity. That deity creates a world in much the same way as an author or poet creates his writing. In turn, then the deity and the speaker are able to communicate directly, if only one can discern the writing:

All things in Nature are beautiful types to the soul that will read them;
Nothing exists upon earth, but for unspeakable ends.
Every object that speaks to the senses was meant for the spirit:
Nature is but a scroll—God's hand-writing thereon.
Ages ago, when man was pure, ere the flood overwhelmed him,
While in the image of God every soul yet lived,
Everything stood as a letter or word of a language familiar,
Telling of truths which now only the angels can read.
Lost to man was the key of those sacred hieroglyphics—
Stolen away by sin—till with Jesus restored.
Now with infinite pains we here and there spell out a letter;
Now and then will the sense feebly shine through the dark.
When we perceive the light which breaks through the visible symbol,
What exultation is ours! we the discovery have made!
Yet is the meaning the same as when Adam lived sinless in Eden,
Only long-hidden it slept and now again is restored.
Man unconsciously uses figures of speech every moment,
Little dreaming the cause why to such terms he is prone—
Little dreaming that everything has its own correspondence
Folded within it of old, as in the body the soul.
Gleams of the mystery fall on us still, though much is forgotten,
And through our commonest speech illumines the path of our thoughts.
Thus does the lordly sun shine out a type of the Godhead;
Wisdom and Love the beams that stream on a darkened world.
Thus do the sparkling waters flow, giving joy to the desert,
And the great Fountain of Life opens itself to the thirst.
Thus does the word of God distil like the rain and the dew-drops,
Thus does the warm wind breathe like to the Spirit of God,
And the green grass and the flowers are signs of the regeneration.

O thou Spirit of Truth; visit our minds once more!
Give us to read, in letters of light, the language celestial,
Written all over the earth—written all over the sky:
Thus may we bring our hearts at length to know our Creator,
Seeing in all things around types of the Infinite Mind.

W. T. Field: noble thoughts and high ideals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birth of Burgess: I'll Kill you

With a name like Gelett Burgess, it shouldn't be surprising that he became a humor writer. Well, technically his first name was Frank but he dropped that name before he became an author. Born in Boston on January 30, 1866, he found life in that city a bit stifling and, after graduating from M.I.T. in 1887, moved west to San Francisco to take a job as a draftsman for a railroad company. On the west coast, Burgess became associated with a couple local newspapers before contributing to national (and international) publications. He lived overseas for a time and, eventually, he moved back to Boston.

In addition to coining the writing term "blurb," Burgess was known for a series of comical works, sometimes aimed at children, which also ranged into the territory of nonsense. His most famous work, in his lifetime and after, is a two-line bit of doggerel which came to be known as "The Purple Cow: Reflections on a Mythic Beast Who's Quite Remarkable, At Least":

I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow, I'd rather see than be one!

In later publications it was broken into four lines. First published in May 1895 in a new magazine Burgess started called The Lark, the poem was surprisingly popular — especially to its author, who later resented its success. Among its avowed admirers was Theodore Roosevelt and soon Burgess became known as "the author of the Purple Cow," no matter what else he wrote. One story claims that, some 45 years later, a man in New York brought a cow dyed purple to Burgess and declared, "There, now you've seen one." Well before then, he already had it with the poem and published "Confession: and a Portrait Too, Upon a Background that I Rue" in The Lark:

Ah, yes, I wrote the "Purple Cow"—
I'm Sorry, now, I wrote it;
But I can tell you Anyhow
I'll Kill you if you Quote it!

Birth of Robert Underwood Johnson

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that a baby born on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. would grow up to become interested in federal politics. Such was the case with Robert Underwood Johnson, who was born on January 12, 1853, in the nation's capital. He was raised partly in that city, partly in the state of Indiana, the son of a prominent attorney and jurist. After graduating from Earlham College in 1871 (the institution gave him an honorary doctorate less than three decades later), he entered the publishing profession, and never left it. By his early 20s, he was associated with Scribner's Monthly, becoming associate editor (under Richard Watson Gilder) after its transformation into Century Magazine.

Many of Johnson's contributions to literature were published piecemeal in the form of essays and poems before collecting them into books here and there. More importantly to the literary community, Johnson became associated with the American Copyright League and similar organizations. Though many joined such clubs for their social aspects or for the acclaim that came with membership, Johnson worked hard for the Copyright League, petitioning Congress to find ways to protect authors' rights, serving on various committees, and holding the treasurer/secretary titles. When several like-minded groups came together to advocate for copyright, Johnson served on the executive committee.

His role in passing what became the International Copyright Act of 1891 was acknowledged worldwide. The government of France, for example, gave him the cross of the Legion of Honor, conferring him with the title of chevalier. Fellow copyright advocates in the United States presented him with a silver cup. However, there is perhaps no greater indication of his importance for copyright law than President Benjamin Harrison. A fellow Indiana resident, Harrison signed the bill into law using a quill made from an eagle feather which Johnson himself had made. Johnson was allowed to keep the historic pen after its use. With this in mind, here is his short poem "Luck and Work":

While one will search the season over
To find the magic four-leaved clover,
Another, with not half the trouble,
Will plant a crop to bear him double.

Birth of Nack: dawn of another New-Year

James M. Nack was born into a poor New York City family on January 4, 1809. With little money for education, he was taught at home and was an able reader and writer at age 4 and began writing crude poems by age 8. In that year, however, 1817, he also experienced a major change in his life. He fell down a staircase and hit his head hard, knocking him unconscious for weeks. When he awoke, he was deaf.

It was then that Nack's family enrolled him in school for the first time: the newly-opened New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. His interest in writing grew and he wrote a full-length play by age 12. As a teenager, he found a job with an attorney, and devoured the books in his boss's ample library, further inspiring his writing. He published his first book The Legend of the Rocks and Other Poems in 1827. Critics called him an "intellectual wonder." Some scholars today acknowledge the book as the first one written by an American who was deaf. He was 18.

Nack continued writing, supplementing his income as a legal clerk and translator from at least three languages. Advocates for early special education used Nack as an example of the potential in people who were deaf. After all, he not only lived an ordinary life (marrying, having children, working successfully in a job), but he also lived in an extraordinary life as the author of at least four books and as a linguist. His writings often reflected on life and death, on love and faith, and range from very short lyrics to long epics. From his first book, "Ode to the New Year, 1826":

How many are now in the cold grave reposing
   Who welcom'd the dawn of the year that has fled!
How little, alas! did they think that its closing
   Should find them enshrin'd in the urn of the dead!
How many a bosom, now bounding as lightly,
   Shall yield its last throb, and be motionless laid;
The spark of existence, now beaming so brightly,
   Extinguished forever in sepulchral shade:
How many this year to the grave's dark dominions
   Shall hasten, who welcome its rising career,
Ere time once again on his air-feather'd pinions
   Shall usher the dawn of another New-Year!

And I, who now muse on the thousands departed,
   May follow them ere the return of this day,
Bedew'd with the tears of some friend brokenhearted,
   Who now smiles upon me unthinking and gay;
And better than I should survive to deplore them,
   The few that to share my affections remain,
O better by far I should perish before them,
   Nor hail the return of a New-Year again.
The hearts that now love me, will they not regret me,
   Shall ever my memory cease to be dear?
The friends of my bosom,—O can they forget me,
   If swept from their sight by the close of the year?

If all I have lov'd have repaid my affections
   With ardour unbounded, unfeigned as mine own,
My name, in the hearts of my friends and connexions,
   Shall ever be cherish'd on memory's throne;
But little it then will avail to me, whether
   Remember'd by those I have lov'd, or forgot;
In mansions of bliss when united together,
   On earth if they valued my friendship or not,
Love breathing around in the zephyrs of heaven
   Shall each to the other forever endear,
Whom there our Redeemer a mansion has given
   To live and to love through Eternity's Year.

*For much of the information in this post, I am indebted to A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816-1864 (Gallaudet University Press, 2000), edited by Christopher Krentz. The section on Nack includes the image of the poet seen above.

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.