688. b. 44. Griswold in such collections as the Poets of America and The Female Poets of America served up honied materials for the sentimental readers who bought his books. 689. a. 10. Stedman, with a sensitiveness which con. trasts markedly with Poe's brutal directness, placed the dash where Poe had put the word 'Longfellow.' In his Poets of America Stedman restored the word 'Longfellow.' 691. b. 4. Heinrich Heine, the German poet (17971856), spent the last twenty-five years of his life in Paris. In 1847 a terrible spinal disease began to fasten itself upon him, the disease that during the last seven years of his life chained him, as he expressed it to his mattress grave.' He has recorded his last walk out of doors in May, 1848: 'With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time disconsolately, as if she would say: Dost thou not see, then, that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?' Emma Lazarus, in her poem 'Venus of the Louvre,' has commemorated the event in these lines: 'I saw not her alone, ON LYNN TERRACE language there is anything more delicate, tender, arch, and spherical in rounded beauty.' to The setting for the story Aldrich knew in. timately. He had removed with his parents New Orleans in 1846, when he was ten years of age, and had lived there until the death of his father three years later. b. 8. Sir Charles Lyell, 1797-1875, the celebrated British geologist, visited the United States in 1841, in 1845-46, and several times later. His book A Second Visit to the United States of North America appeared in 1849. 695. b. 9. Entre or et roux, etc. God made her long hair between gold and reddish brown. 696. b. 45. C'est le bon Dieu, etc. It is the good God who has given me this. TO ENGLAND 704. These sonnets are part of a series written by Boker at the time of the Crimean war. The To America is an echo of the same period. DIRGE FOR A SOLDIER 706. General Philip Kearney, a graduate of Col umbia, joined the army in 1837. spent two years with the army of France, was a cavalry leader in the Mexican war, became commander in the Army of the Potomac in 1862, and was killed at Chantilly in 1862. He was a dashing romantic type of soldier and his loss was felt to be a severe blow to the Northern cause. TO GEORGE H. BOKER 707. In the third stanza reference is made to Boker's four tragedies, Calaynos, Anne Boleyn, Leonor de Guzman, and Francesca da Rimini, the reference to 'hell's murk air' in the last coming from the fact that Dante in his journey through the Infernal regions encountered the unhappy lovers In the fourth stanza the allusion is to Boker's comedy The Widow's Marriage. 694. Aldrich was an artist who polished his lyrics with infinite there. Greenslet, his biographer, instances this example of his poetic methods: care. When he came to the concluding stanza of "Lynn Terrace," one of the finest of his poems, he brooded for days to find the one inevitable word to go with "sea-gull." After trying and rejecting scores of applicants for the position, he found it in the unexpected word "petulant," which gives the last lively touch of felicity to a perfect stanza.' PÈRE ANTOINE'S DATE PALM The same year that this story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly it was published in Aldrich's collection Out of His Head, and Other Stories, 'encased in an elaborate setting of narrative machinery that he afterwards abandoned to its great advantage.' He issued it privately in 1866 in an edition of twenty copies which he gave to his friends, and again in 1873 in Marjorie Daw and Other People. Mrs. Hawthorne, widow of the romancer, was one to receive one of the twenty copies of the private edition, and of it she wrote to Aldrich: 'I do not believe that in the English politics. Casual visitors tarried for a few hours to shake hands with the newly chosen chief; correspondents of leading newspapers established temporary headquarters from which to send their readers pen-pictures of his personal appearance, his daily habits, his home and public surroundings, and to catch the flying and often contradictory of his probable intentions. Artists came to paint his portrait, ambitious politicians to note new party currents, and veteran statesmen to urge the adoption of favorite theories or the advancement of favorite adherents.'- Nicolay and Hay. rumors 'PETROLEUM V. NASBY' 720. The Saturday evening before President Lincoln left Washington, to go to the front, just previous to the capture of Richmond, I was with him from seven o'clock till nearly twelve. It had been a very hard day with him. The pressure of office-seekers was greater at this juncture than I ever knew it to be, and he was almost worn out. Among the callers that evening was a party composed of a Senator, a Representative, an exLieutenant Governor of a Western State, and several private citizens. They had business of great importance, involving the necessity of the President's examination of voluminous documents. Pushing everything aside, he said to one of the party, com "Have you seen the Nasby Papers?" "No, I have not," was the answer. "Who is Nasby?" "There is a chap out in Ohio," returned the President, "who has been writing a series of letters in the newspapers over the signature of Petroleum V. Nasby. Some one sent me a pamphlet collection of them the other day. I am going to write to Petroleum' to come down here, and I intend to tell him if he will municate his talent to me, I will swap places with him!" Thereupon he arose, went to a drawer in his desk, and taking out the letters," he sat down and read one to the company, finding in their enjoyment of it the temporary excitement and relief which another man would have found in a glass of grog! The instant he had ceased, the book was thrown aside, his countenance relapsed into its habitual serious expression, and the business was entered upon with the utmost earnestness.'— F. B. Carpenter. THE JUMPING FROG After its publication in the Saturday Press, the story was copied by all the papers of the East and its author at once became famous. It was issued in book form, May 1, 1867, with the title The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches. Lowell hailed the little book with generous praise, calling it the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in America.' THE MISSION DOLORES 726. One cannot fail to note the influence of Irving's Sketch Book. In his early stories, like The Legend of Monte del Diablo' in the twelfth volume of the Atlantic Monthly, 1863, Harte set out to do for California what Irving had done for the Highlands of the Hudson, and to do it after Irving's manner. WASHINGTON IRVING 738. b. 46. Fables of Weems. Rev. M. L. Weems, 1760-1825, was for a time pastor of the church at Mount Vernon, Virginia, of which Washington was an attendant. Later he became a very successful book agent for the publishing house of Carey of Philadelphia. His life of Washington published in Philadelphia in 1800 undoubtedly was the most popular biography of the great President that ever was written. Several of the most widelyknown anecdotes of the youth of Washington, like the cherry-tree incident for instance, rest upon the unsupported evidence of Weems. Much that he has recorded is more than doubtful. 739. a. 52. Frascati, a town twelve miles south-east of Rome, celebrated for its villas. .b. 47. The North American Review, founded in 1815, ran for many years as a quarterly. Until 1878 it was published at Boston. In its earlier years at least it was the most influential critical Journal in America. LEAVES OF GRASS 741. In 1867 when Burroughs issued this first book of his, Whitman had published four editions of Leaves of Grass, 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, and his volume Drum-Taps, 1866. It was undoubtedly the 1860 edition that fell into Burroughs's hands. Whitman had been dismissed from his clerkship at Washington in June, 1865, for the alleged immorality of this book, and his friend O'Connor had in September of the same year begun the defense of the poet with his pamphlet The Good Gray Poet. Burroughs's Walt Whitman as Poet and Person is in one respect a continuation of the defense of Whitman during this critical period of his poetic career. In another and larger sense it is a call for a new period, a voice of the times, a new statement of literary principles for a new after-the-war era. 744. a. 4. Wordsworth in the well-known preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, the first edition of which had appeared in 1798, had called for a return to Nature. He would strip poetry of its artificial vocabulary and would treat of humble subjects in a simple way. The book and the preface are generally taken as the beginning of the new romantic period of the nineteenth century. Every new period, it would seem, begins with a call for a return to Nature. LIGHT IN A DARK PLACE 760. That Lincoln did win a case in something like the manner described so graphically by Eggles ton is undoubtedly true, Miss Tarbell in her Life of Lincoln, Vol. I, page 272, has recorded all that is now surely known about the case. She has told thus the central incident of the trial: The most damaging evidence was that of one Allen, who swore that he had seen Armstrong strike Metzker about ten or eleven o'clock in the evening. When asked how he could see, he answered that the moon shone brightly. Under Lincoln's questioning he repeated the statement until it was impossible that the jury should forget it. With Allen's testimony unimpeached, conviction seemed certain. Lincoln's address to the jury was full of pathos. It was not as a hired attorney that he was there, he said, but to discharge a debt of friendship. But Lincoln was not relying on sympathy alone to win his case. In closing he reviewed the evidence, showing that all depended on Allen's testimony, and this he said he could prove to be false. Allen never saw Armstrong strike Metzker by the light of the moon, for at the hour when he said he saw the fight, between ten and eleven o'clock, the moon was not in the heavens. Then procuring an almanac, he passed it to the judge and jury. The moon, which was on that night only in its first quarter, set before midnight.' JIM BLUDSO 767. To the Overland Monthly for September, 1870,' writes Thayer in his life of Hay, Bret Harte contributed Plain Language from Truthful James, in which he introduced the Heathen Chinee to an international audience. The following month, during Hay's visit to his family in Warsaw [Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi] he is said to have written two poems, Little Breeches and Jim Bludso in the supposed dialect of the unshorn Westerners. Some one reports that he was with Hay in the hotel overlooking the river at Keokuk when he dashed off Jim Bludso. There have been many other statements and counterstatements, and much speculation. . . Hay printed Little Breeches in the miscellaneous columns of the Weekly Tribune, on Dec. 2, 1870, signed only by his initials. It had an instant success, comparable only to that of the Heathen Chinee itself.' In March, 1871, he wrote Howells: 'Have you seen Jim Bludso? I send you a copy. It has been more widely liked and denounced than Little Breech.' Later he received $50 for Banty Tim, the third of the Pike County Ballads, which was first issued in Harper's Weekly. LINCOLN'S FAME 768. a. 18. One of the finest poems on the occasion of his death was that in which the London Punch made its manly recantation of the slanders with which it had pursued him for four years: "Beside this corpse that bears for winding-sheet The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew, Between the mourners at his head and feet, Say, scurile jester, is there room for you? "Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, To lame my pencil, to confute my pen; To make me own this hind of princes peer, This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.” Author's Note. 771. a. 7. Henry IV, Henry of Navarre, one of the hero kings of France, leader of the Huguenots. He published the Edict of Nantes in 1598 ending the religious wars of his time. a. 8. William of Orange, the central figure in the struggle of the Dutch against Spain from which emerged the Dutch republic, the theme of Motley' Rise of the Dutch Republic. 16. The Béarnais, a surname given Henry IV, who was a native of Béarn. 21. Saevis tranquillus in undis, calm amid the savage waves. 52. Lowell, in an immortal ode, the Commemora tion Ode, see page 404. b. 57. Montalembert, (1810-1870), a French historian and statesman, who at the time of Lincoln's death was a powerful influence in France. A MODERN INSTANCE 774. Squire Gaylord rallied from the shock of paralysis, was taken East as soon as he could be moved with safety, but died the following spring. Bartly Hubbard fled to Whited Sepulchre, Arizona, and shortly afterward was shot by a citizen whom he had slandered. KIT CARSON'S RIDE 792. I have used the text that Miller made in 1908 for his final edition of his works. In this earlier narrative the Indian Maiden deliberately sacrifices herself to save her lover who seems to be thinking only of his own safety. In a note to the revised poem he wrote: 'It was too long for the tumultuous and swift action; and then the end was coarse and unworthy the brave spirit of Kit Carson. I have cut and changed it much.' The original text is to be found in Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature and in the Warner Library. The opening stanza in italics was written for the final revision. BY THE SUN-DOWN SEAS 793. In his final edition Miller wrote concerning the two stanzas beginning with line 307: These final verses are peculiarly descriptive of the home I have built here on the Heights for my declining years; although written and published in London in 1873.' The poem is autobiographic throughout. The distance, counting the contours of often round about ways, was quite, or nearly, three thousand miles. The time was seven months and five days. There were no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort. We had only the road as Nature had made it. Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a ford we would look back and see our smoldering fires of the day before.. On the 15th of May, 1852, we, ten miles above St. Joe to avoid the multitude and inevitable mud, crossed the Missouri into the vast wilderness and the extraordinary march was cominenced. The sun-down seas were before us, civilization, such as we had known, and all sorts, lay behind us. There could be for us, no turning back. We were not of that material. We had two big heavily laden weapons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three boys to ride. . . . Soon we began to come upon new-made graves by the streams and at camping The cholera places. Then the graves were many. had broken out and hundreds were dying and thousands turning back. . . . In the midst of all this turning back, this despair and death, our parents kept steadily on, making slow marches, keeping in good heart,' etc. Bear Edition of Miller's Poems, Chapter 5. 812. a. 5. M. Taine. Taine's History of English Literature was first published in 1863. 813. a. 17. Lettres de mon Moulin, Letters from my Mill. 28. Fromont Jeune et Risler Ainé, Fromont Junior and Risler Senior. 33. Les Rois en Exil, Kings in Exile. 37. Le Nabab, The Nabob. b. 5. Coquine, a feminine rascal. 814. a. 33. Tambourinaire, Tambourine player. 42. Le premier magistrat de France, the leading magistrate of France. 815. b. 49. Mon Frère et Moi, My Brother and I. 816. b. 56. La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, The Error of the Abbot Mouret. 817. a. 14. Contes du Lundi, Stories of Monday. 14. Le Petit Chose, The little thing. 25. Writing his memoirs. Daudet's Thirty Years in Paris appeared in 1887, and his Recollections of a Man of Letters in 1888. b. 13. Produit du Midi, a product of the South. 818. a. 21. Cinquièmes, sixth floor or attic. b. 4. Article de Paris, a jimcrack peculiar to Paris. 29. Fait de chic, mere dexterity, sleight of hand. GREVILLE FANE 823. a. 49. Gagnepain, means of subsistence. b. 27. Pensions, boarding and lodging houses. 49. Femme du monde, woman of the world. 824. a. 40. Faux pas, false step, or vulgar blunder. b. 7. Premiers frais, initial expense. 825. b. 40. Embonpoint, stoutness. 57. Liaison, intimate acquaintance. 826. a. 48. Vieux jeu, old fashioned. 831. a. 24. Par excellence, in an eminent degree. 835. a. 49. Father Marquette was a French Jesuit missionary who accompanied Joliet on his explor ing expedition in 1673. He died while attempting to establish a mission among Illinois Indians. b. 26. The Grenadiers was written by Heinrich Heine, the German poet, about 1821. The translation, which is beautifully done, was undoubtedly made by Miss Woolson. 37. This line has a startling and suggestive appearance in the original German: 'Und der Kaiser, der Kaiser gefangen.' 837. a. 6. Mon père. . . Voilà! my father... Behold! THE CENTENNIAL CANTATA OF COLUMBIA 843. For the New York Daily Tribune, Wednesday, April 12, 1876, Bayard Taylor wrote: The announcement of the Centennial Commission that the hymn for the opening ceremonies of the Exhibition on May 10, has been furnished by John G. Whittier, and the text of Mr. Dudley Buck's cantata by Sidney Lanier of Georgia, has been received by the press and people of the United States with entire satisfaction. No voice more earnest than that of the Psalmist of Amesbury could be found to breathe the solemn invocation; and Mr. Lanier, also, if less widely known as a poet, possesses the qualities which fit him for the more difficult task. He is a native of Georgia, who, after fighting in the Southern ranks as a youth, studied law at Macon, but has at last found his true field of activity, and devotes himself wholly to music and literature. His two remarkable poems entitled Corn and The Symphony, published in Lippincott's Magazine, brought him suddenly into prominence. They are characterized by a freshness and affluence of thought, a tropical luxuriance of fancy, and a singular grace and variety of rhythmi cal effect, which justify the anticipations of his friends in regard to future achievement. Moreover, he has the additional advantage, exceptionally rare among poets, of pronounced musical talent. For three Winters past, he has been a performer in the Peabody Orchestra, at Baltimore, under Mr. Asgar Hamerik. 'The Cantata is a form of musical composition which was primarily applied to subiects of a meditative, didactic or devotional character. It has thus come to be one of the accepted forms of musical expression for anniversaries, historical commemorations, and other occasions of a large and stately character. The text bears the same relation to the music as that of an oratorio, and must be written with direct reference to the changes, contrasts, and combinations of voices and instruIt presents a most ungrateful task to the ments. poet who is not able to call up an attendant musical inspiration, and persuade his conceptions to acknowledge the double sway. Mr. Lanier's verses, therefore, must be read with constant reference to the inevitable restrictions of his task. Limited to sixty lines, in which not only the solos and choruses, but also the violins and bassoons must have their share; compelled to tell his story, not in poetic recital, but through the medium of reflection and contrasted emotions; governed, finally, in the very sounds of his words by that of the notes to which they are set, his work is amenable to a separate law, and may fairly assert its right to a separate judgment. 'The verses represent, as largely as the space allows, the past and present of the Country, the powers which opposed themselves to settlement, growth, and independence, and the blended elements which gave success, closing with rejoicing, an angelic voice of promise, and a welcome to the world. It is both simple and original in character. Contrasted with the Cantata written by Tennyson for the opening of the International Exhibition in London, its greater freedom and freshness are very evident, while in earnestness and absence of selfgratulation it will doubtless harmonize with the spirit of Whittier's hymn. Mr. Dudley Buck's music has already been noticed in The Tribune, and there seems to be no impropriety in also giving the complete text of Mr. Lanier's share in the work, especially as the printed copies are now in the hands of 800 singers.' THE SONG OF THE CHATTAHOOCHE 844. The song was first published in 1877, but later was revised by Lanier and published in its present form in the Independent, December 20, 1883. The earlier form is to be found in Fulton's Southern Life in Southern Literature, 1917. 1. Hills of Habersham. The Chattahooche River rises in Habersham County, Georgia, flows for a short distance through Hall County, uniting with the Flint River at the south-western end of Georgia, It is about five hundred miles long and is navigable by steamboat to Columbus, Georgia. THE BANNER OF THE JEW 857. 4. Five-fold lion-lineage, the five sons of the aged Mattathias: Jochanan, Simon, Judas, Eleazar, and Jonathan, known as the Maccabees, who delivered Judea and Judaism from the power of Syria 175-164 B. C. and established a dynasty of priestkings which lasted for over a century. 858. 1. Mispeh, the culminating point of the tribe of Benjamin, became the meeting-place of the tribes, the Washington of the Israelite federation.'- Renan. It was five miles northwest of Jerusalem. IN EXILE 35. Gabirol to Spinoza. Gabirol, Jewish poet and philosopher, lived in Saragossa, Spain, where he died in 1070. Parts of his poems have been incorporated into the Jewish liturgy. Spinoza (1632 1677) was a Jew of Spanish emigrant parentage who made himself one of the most famous philoso phers of his century. THE NEW EZEKIEL 859. 1. These dead bones, see Ezekiel xxxvii, 1-14. NEBUCHADNEZZAR 860. The poem that Russell himself considered his best production, Nebuchadnezzar, was written immediately after watching an altercation between a negro and his mule on one of the streets of Port Gibson. Maurice G. Fulton. THE PIE GHOST 878. An episode in the novel The Merry Chanter. The ship Merry Chanter has run aground in the harbor and must wait for a heavy gale off shore and a spring tide to set her afloat again. In the meantime the passengers go ashore for a picnic. Caught in a rainstorm, they seek late at night the former home of Dolor Trip, one of their number. The schoolmaster has been discovered earlier in the narrative as a stowaway. He was running away in terror from his boarding mistress Mrs. Bodship. THE NEW SOUTH 900. a. 6. Benjamin H. Hill (1832-1882), a lawyer of Georgia, a prominent figure in the Confederate government. 901. a. 50. Dr. Talmage, Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832-1902), a very popular lecturer and pulpit orator of the period. The allusion is to a statement in one of his lectures. 902. a. 1. Battle-stained cross. The Confederate battle flag was a blue ground with a red cross bear. ing thirteen stars. 38. Bill Arp. Charles H. Smith (1826-1903). See page 604. 52. Careless man about fire,- General Sherman reported that on his march through Georgia he used for his army property worth twenty million dollars and destroyed property to the value of eighty millions more.' 903. a. 29. Mr. Toombs.- Robert Toombs (181085), leader of the secession party in Georgia. b. 13. Those who assume; the allusion here is to George W. Cable, the novelist, whose writings about Southern problems were regarded by the South as misrepresentative and injurious. 19. Johnston surrendered. General Sherman offered the Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston terms that Lincoln and his cabinet considered as too liberal. He later surrendered on the terms that General Grant had offered to General Lee, three weeks before. 32. Jewel in the toad's head, As You Like It. Act II, Scene i 904. a. 3. The New South, The term had previously been used by Benjamin H. Hill, in answering a toast. |