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PUBLICATIONS
OF
THE
Mississippi Historical Society

Edited by
FRANKLIN L. RILEY
Secretary

Reprinted 1919
BY
DUNBAR ROWLAND, LL. D.
Secretary

VOL. II.

OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI:
PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY.
1899.

OFFICERS FOR 1899

PRESIDENT:

GENERAL STEPHEN D. LEE, Columbus, Mississippi.

VICE-PRESIDENTS:

PROFESSOR R. W. JONES, University of Mississippi. JUDGE B. T. KIMBROUGH, Oxford, Mississippi.

ARCHIVIST:

CHANCELLOR R. B. FULTON, University of Mississippi.

SECRETARY AND TREASURER:

PROFESSOR FRANKLIN L. RILEY, University of Mississippi.

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE:

(IN ADDITION TO THE ABOVE OFFICIALS)

PROFESSOR J. M. WHITE, Agricultural and Mechanical College of Mississippi. PROFESSOR CHARLES HILLMAN BROUGH, of Mississippi College. PROFESSOR W. L. WEBER, of Millsaps College. PRESIDENT J. R. PRESTON, of Stanton College.

All persons who are interested in the work of the Society and desire to promote its objects are invited to become members.

There is no initiation fee. The only cost to members is, annual dues, $2.00, or life dues, $30.00. Members receive all publications of the Society free of charge.

Donations of relics, manuscripts, books and papers are solicited for the Museum and Archives of the Society.

Address all communications to the Secretary of the Mississippi State Historical Society, University P. O., Mississippi.

CONTENTS

[THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN RECENT SOUTHERN LITERATURE.]
BY C. ALPHONSO SMITH, A. M., PH. D.

The year 1870 marks an epoch in the history of the South. It witnessed not only the death of Robert E. Lee but the passing also of John Pendleton Kennedy, George Denison Prentice, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and William Gilmore Simms. In literature it was not only the end of the old but the beginning of the new, for in 1870 the new movement in Southern literature may be said to have been inaugurated in the work of Irwin Russell. I have attempted elsewhere to trace briefly the chronological outlines of this literature from 1870 to the present time. In this paper, therefore, I shall discuss not the history of this literature but rather the history in this literature.

When we compare Southern literature of ante-bellum days with that produced since 1870 we note at once certain obvious differences of style and structure. In the older literature the sentences are longer, the paragraphs less coherent, adjectives more abundant, descriptions more elaborate, plots more intricate and fanciful. In the newer literature the pen is held more firmly; there are fewer episodes; incidents are chosen to illustrate character rather than to enhance the plot; the language is more temperate; the pathos and humor more subtle; some fixed goal is kept in view and the action of the story converges steadily toward this end.

But apart from these stylistic and structural differences there are differences that appeal to the student of history equally as much as to the student of pure literature. Since 1870 Southern writers have begun to find their topics and their inspiration in the life that is round about them. They are resorting not so much to books as to memory, observation and experience. They are not rising into solitary and selfish renown; they are lifting the South with them. They are writing Southern history because they are describing Southern life. The writings of Irwin Russell, Sidney Lanier, Joel Chandler Harris, Miss Murfree, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, Miss Grace King, Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart, and John Fox, Jr., are spreading a knowledge of Southern life and Southern conditions where such knowledge has never penetrated before. And though we call this literature Southern, it is neither sectional in its appeal nor provincial in its workmanship. This, then, is what I mean by the historical element in recent Southern literature.

It has long seemed to me that much of the immediate influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin both in this country and in England was due to the fact that the South could not show in all of its ante-bellum literature a single novel treating the same themes treated by Mrs. Stowe, but treating them from a different point of view. It was the first attempt to portray in vivid colors the social and institutional conditions of the South. None of our writers had utilized the material that lay ready to their hands. There was no story written in the spirit of Marse Chan or Uncle Remus which the South could hold up and say,

"Look here, upon this picture, and on this."

The reception accorded Mrs. Stowe's book in the South teaches a valuable lesson, and a lesson which Southern writers have for thirty years profited by Uncle Tom's Cabin was met by bitter criticism, by argument, by denunciation, by denial, or by contemptuous silence. But the appeal made by a literary masterpiece, however deficient or faulty in its premises, is not thus to be negatived. The true answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin and the most adequate answer that could be given is to be found in the historical note that characterizes the work of Irwin Russell and those who have succeeded him.

I wish to state, therefore, in somewhat broader terms than I have yet seen it stated, what seems to me the historical importance of Irwin Russell in American literature. His priority in the fictional use of the negro dialect has been frequently emphasized, but I wish to emphasize his priority in utilizing for literary purposes the social and institutional conditions in which he himself had lived. Skill in the use of a dialect is a purely literary excellence, but when a writer portrays and thus perpetuates the peculiar life of a people numbering four million, he is to that extent an historian; and Irwin Russell's example in this respect meant a complete change of front in Southern literature. He did not go to Italy for his inspiration as Richard Henry Wilde had done. You find no Rodolph, or Hymns to the Gods, or Voyage to the Moon among his writings; but you will find that deeper poetic vision that saw pathos and humor and beauty in the humble life that others had contemned.

The appearance of Christmas-Night in the Quarters meant that Southern literature was now to become a true reproduction of Southern conditions. Our writers were henceforth to busy themselves with the interpretation of life at close range. They were to produce a kaleidoscopic body of fiction, each bit of which, sparkling with its own characteristic and independent color, should yet contribute its part to the harmony and symmetry of the whole.

I would not for a moment compare the genius of Irwin Russell with that of Chaucer or of Burns; and yet when Chaucer in the latter part of his life turned from French and Italian sources to find an ampler inspiration in his own England, the England that he knew and loved, he was but illustrating the change that Irwin Russell was to inaugurate in Southern literature; and when Robert Burns broke through the classical trammels of the eighteenth century and lifted the poor Scotch cotter into the circle of the immortals, he was but anticipating your own Mississippian in proving that poetry, like charity, begins at home. To the student of literature, there is a wide difference between the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, The Cotter's Saturday Night, and the Christmas-Night in the Quarters; but to the student of history the poems stand upon the same plane because each is a transcript of contemporary life.

Irwin Russell represents, therefore, a transition of vital significance in our literature, a transition that had been partly foretold in the work of Judge Longstreet and Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston. There is as much local coloring in the Georgia Scenes and the Dukesborough Tales as in the work of Irwin Russell; but I do not find the same deft workmanship; I miss in the older works the sympathy, the pathos, and the self-restraint that enable Irwin Russel to be local in his themes without being provincial in his manner.

I do not say that the poet or the novelist must never revert to past history or to historical documents for his topics. His own genius and taste must be his surest guide to both as to topic and to treatment; but I do say that a nation is unfortunate if the builders of its literature invariably draw their material from foreign sources or from the history that was enacted before they were born.

"I have no churlish objection," says Emerson in his Essay on Self-Reliance, "to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows____ The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, ... he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also."

The historical element, therefore, of which I am speaking is not synonymous with the historical novel. The critics apply the term historical novel to those novels that attempt to reproduce the past. These novels are retrospective and essentially romantic. In the work of Sir Walter Scott this form of literature attained its florescence. But I contend that while the historical novel may have a genuinely human interest, its value as history is almost inappreciable as compared with the historical value of the literature that portrays contemporary life. We do not study ancient history in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, but there would be a deplorable gap in our knowledge of fourteenth century England if The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales had never been written.

A hundred years from now Dickens' Tale of Two Cities will not have the historical significance that David Copperfield will have; because the Tale of Two Cities is based on records that are accessible to all students of the French Revolution. It is not an interpretation of life at first hand; it is an interpretation only of books. Then, too, historical investigation is even today far more accurate and scientific than when Dickens wrote. But David Copperfield, which the critics have never called an historical novel, has an historical element that time cannot take away, for it is the record of what an accurate observer saw and felt and heard in the first half of the nineteenth century. The historical novel, therefore, in the current acceptation of the term, contributes nothing to the sources of historical study, though it does popularize history and thus help to prepare an audience for the scientific historian.

Now, the South has produced her full share of historical novels. From Horse-Shoe Robinson in 1835 to The Prisoners of Hope in 1898, Southern writers have shown themselves by no means insensible to the literary possibilities latent in our colonial and revolutionary history. But it was not until 1870 that the South may be said to have had a school of writers who, while not neglecting the historical novel proper, began to find the scenery and materials of their stories chiefly in local conditions and in passing or remembered events. Much, it is true, has been lost to our literature, but much has been saved.

It has often been said that the new movement in Southern literature was due to the influence of Bret Harte's works, but such a statement hardly deserves refutation. The cause lies deeper than this. The events of 1861-65 not only broke the continuity of Southern history but changed forever the social and political status of the Southern states. The past began to loom up strange and remote, but "dear as remembered kisses after death." Men seemed to have lived a quarter of a century in four years. They moved as in a world not realized. Now it is just at such periods that literature finds its opportunity, for at such periods a people's historic consciousness is either deepened or destroyed, and this national consciousness finds expression in historical literature.

The South, then, is slowly writing her history in her literature. Hardly a year passes that some new state or some new period does not find a place in the onward movement. Only in the last year, hundreds of readers who care nothing for formal histories have pored over Mr. Page's Red Rock and learned for the first time the inside history of Reconstruction; in the pages of Miss Murfree's Story of Old Fort Loudon, they have seen the heroism with which the Tennessee soldier won his state from the wilderness and the Indian; in Miss Grace King's De Soto and his Men in the Land of Florida, they have followed the discoverer of the Mississippi on a journey as marvelous and romantic as the fabled voyage of Jason; in The Kentuckians of John Fox, Jr., they have read again of that undying feud between highlander and lowlander that has found expression in more than a hundred English and Scotch ballads; in Chalmette of Mr. Clinton Ross, they have stood again with Jackson on an immortal battlefield; in The Wire Cutters of Mrs. M. E. M. Davis, they have witnessed a hitherto unexplored region, that of West Texas, added to the growing map of Southern literature; in The Prisoners of Hope, by Miss Mary Johnston, they have heard the first mutterings of insurrection under the colonial tyranny of Governor Berkeley,—mutterings that a century later were to be reinforced by the pen of Jefferson and the sword of Washington. And these books mark the record of but twelve months.

Need I say that the significance of this historical movement in our literature is vital and profound for every man and woman before me? or that it merits the earnest consideration of every historical society organized to preserve and perpetuate the facts of our history.

Let me remind you that the literary significance of the Civil War is as noteworthy as its purely historical significance. That struggle meant far more to the South than to the North. To the North it meant the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. To the South it meant decimated families, smoking homesteads, and the passing forever of a civilization unique in human history. But Literature loves a lost cause, provided honor be not lost. Hector, the leader of the vanquished Trojans, is the most princely figure that the Greek Homer has portrayed; the Roman Virgil is proud to trace the lineage of his people not back to the victorious Greeks but to the defeated Trojans; the English poet-laureate finds his deepest inspiration not in the victories of his Saxon ancestors over King Arthur but in King Arthur himself, the fated leader of a losing cause. And so it has always been: the brave but unfortunate reap always the richest measure of literary immortality.

In conclusion, I believe that in the organization of the Mississippi State Historical Society and in the beneficent work that it has wrought during its career of nine years, I see another indication of that growing historic consciousness without which we cannot stand unabashed before the bar of future history. "Deeds of prowess and exalted situations cannot of themselves" says Schlegel (History of Literature, Lecture I) "command our admiration or determine our judgment. A people that would rank high in our esteem must themselves be conscious of the importance of their own doings and fortunes." The invaluable work that is being done by this Society for the history of Mississippi is a part of that larger movement of which I have spoken. Both testify to the advent of that historical spirit which "cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof." If I read aright the signs of the times, the new century will not have been many years old before the history of the South will be enshrined not only in annals and chronicles but in the living letters of a nation's song and story.

[IRWIN RUSSELL—FIRST FRUITS OF THE SOUTHERN ROMANTIC MOVEMENT.]
BY W. L. WEBER.

So wide is the connotation of the word Romanticism, we may make up almost any conceivable definition and be sure we have respectable authority in agreement with the view we have taken. The fault to be found with the current definitions is that they stress the source, at the expense, of the character of that influence which transformed "the age of prose and reason" into the "Renascence of Wonder." The influence to be stressed in the use I shall wish to make of the word Romanticism is protest against the settled, conservative, classical order of things. Secondarily, it will be remembered that the source of much of the literary material used by the protestants is to be found in the remote past—remote whether in time or in charge of mental attitude.

In order to be able to throw a clearly defined portrait of Irwin Russell on the canvas of Southern literature, it will be necessary rapidly to review the main outlines of this Romantic movement in the development of English thought a period which may be shown to be the prototype of our own after-the-war literary life.

We shall not go into details. First we should recall to mind the main literary currents of English thinking from the time of Dryden to the end of the dictatorship of the great Cham himself. It will be readily remembered that fashion in literature had changed soon after Shakespeare's death and his native wood-notes wild were forgot for a time. The age of prose and reason followed. Self-consciousness was a characteristic note of the Augustan, the eighteenth century literature. Narrowness of imagination, and faithfulness in copying made up the main classical elements in many an English poet under the regime of Formalism.

"Back to nature!" was the rallying cry of a protest against this formalism—an inarticulate protest which culminated in the Romantic movement. Under the leadership of Dryden and for more than a century after him, canons of literary art based on classical models had almost undisputed sway. Aristotle filtered through Horace and Horace diluted by Boileau were prescribed by doctors who would correct and amend English speech and literature. From these masters were drawn rules so minute and so inflexible as to put to the death budding originality by the demand for "correctness." If the poet were moved to describe pastoral scenes, he must needs go to Theocritus for the names of his characters, to Virgil for the contour of his scenery. But all this classicism was counterfeit. It was "more Latin than Greek, and more French than Latin." The classical poet, as he misnamed himself, followed with slavish persistence the creed which he had adopted. It was an accepted law that "the best of the modern poets in all languages are those that have the nearest copied the ancients." He would have nothing of country life. Rough and irregular scenery were distasteful to him. Mountains he described by Gothic—his pet term of opprobrium. Scenery as well as thought must conform to the level. "Decent conformity," then, characterized the Augustan age and enthusiasm had no place in the age of Dryden and of Pope.

Some of the characteristic features of the Romantic movement may be readily got at, by prefixing a negative to the qualities of the classical school. The country, out door life, rugged mountains, folk-songs, ballads in every form, the picturing of English people in English scenery were used as subject-matter—in other words, the telling what the writer had himself seen and, therefore, what he really knew, instead of what he had read. It was this reaction against formalism which produced such men as Chatterton, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott.

It is not within the purpose of this paper to give a full list of the writers who may be said to be the forerunners of this movement which dominated English poetry during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Nor is it needful to enter into the controversy as to who first gave evidence of the changing attitude. So careful a critic as Theodore Watts assigns the place of priority to Thomas Chatterton, styles him the Father of the Romantic School, and insists that to his influence may be traced some of the best work of Keats and of Coleridge. It will always be well to remember that changes in literary habit do not take place in a year, rarely in a decade. It will, therefore, be easy to point out poets as early as Gray who gave prophecy of the new era. This much at least is noteworthy—putting aside the question as to who comes first of all—that the new current of ideas began very early to flow through poets who were hardly more than boys. Professor Beers has already reminded us that in Joseph Warton as well as in Thomas Chatterton—neither of whom was more than eighteen years of age—we may see the set of the literary current.

It may not be insisting too strongly on a parallel to see in the history of Southern literature a state of affairs much like that we have just sketched. It will be remembered that in 1818 Bryant sounded his protest against a "sickly and affected imitation of the peculiar manner of the late popular poets of England." As late as 1848 Lowell did not hesitate roughly to assert:

They stole Englishmen's books and thought Englishmen's thought,
With English salt on the tail our wild Eagle was caught.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that Sydney Smith should have asked with suggestion of truth even if with evidence of venom, "Who reads an American book?" American literature in the Northern and Middle sections escaped from bondage many years before the South came into its own literary inheritance. Just as unreasoning worship of a pseudo-classicism had its death-grip on Eighteenth Century writers so a like uncritical devotion to the usually read classic writers and to earlier English authors had checked the growth of the budding Southern literature of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Conservative as the South has always been in matters of thought it was not surprising that this should be so. Paul H. Hayne tells what contemptuous references were made by the literary coterie of Charleston to the early efforts of Simms because he dared aspire to cultivate the Muses, when he must needs get his Homer through the medium of Chapman or of Pope. This respect unto classical authority was of long continuance among cultured men and showed itself, also, in the dry and tedious essays of Legare who was reputed a great scholar.

It was, indeed, not until 1870 that the South may be said to have achieved literary independence. As the sway of Greece and Rome passed away, the South came to be a literary dependency of England. Kennedy and Sims are dominated by Scott, just as Wirt and his friends of the "Old Bachelor" group got their inspiration from the Spectator. Of course there were poets as Hayne and Timrod and story-writers as Johnston and Thompson who sang and wrote clearly and with a note of individuality. But Lowell might have described the greater part of Southern literary work in the words:

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion
To what will be thought of it over the ocean.

With the same thought in mind Poe wrote that "one might suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel, their having crossed the sea is with us so great a distinction."

This natural conservatism was upheld by the fact that many Southerners of means sent their sons to England to be educated. The South being settled for the most part by emigrants of English blood, it is not surprising that the controlling influence should be from mother-country.

Before the war, Sydney Smith's cutting question might have been answered with greater suggestion of truth in the form, "who reads a Southern book?" A not untruthful answer would have been, "Southerners do not." We have never adequately supported our own writers. We have added to the tragedy of nations by allowing Poe to die the death of an outcast; Timrod to break his heart, without a crust to eat or a penny to buy food; Lanier not to have time to record the strains that were demanding utterance, in order to spend his wasting strength seeking support for wife and children; Russell broken in courage and in fortune to find not even a resting-place in the soil of his native State. Before the war the Southern library shelves were weighed down with Fielding, Smollett, Addison, Johnson, Scott and Dickens. Charleston had a public meeting to congratulate Macaulay on the issuance of one of the later volumes of his History. Simms and Timrod lived in the City by the Sea in obscurity and neglect. We have not yet reached the place where we turn first to our own writers.

To say we had no writers, no books is not true. We had a plentiful supply of books whose writers with a kind of literary metonymy transferred the conventionalities and commonplaces of English life to the atmosphere of the South. The result was not English and it was not Southern but it had the worst features of both. Wax flowers were long a popular form of domestic art and the literary amateur caught the unreality of the maker of flowers.

There was, indeed, abundant material in the South and much of it was made use of. A distinct weakness in our workmanship arose from the fact that too much material was used for a given purpose. The stage was overcrowded with characters, the plot was weakened by using too much incident. This surplus-age of incident seems to have distracted the writer's attention from the details of his craft. The value of the work of art was lost in carelessness of workmanship. The new order of things was to see a renaissance of simplicity. It was to be expected that in order to bring about a re-crystallization of Southern literary canons a shock was essential. That shock came in the form of the war between the States. New ideas, newly expressed was the inheritance.

The new school of Southern writers found their material near at hand and yet from a past growingly remote. They delighted to tell of the days of slavery—to idealize that period, perhaps—and with some acquaintance with slavery as it actually existed. While it has not been a half century since the master and his slave lived together in Southern lands, yet the number of those who have had experiential knowledge of slave-life in the South is increasingly small. To be accurate the picture of master and man had need to be painted quickly.

Perhaps the very first of our writers to give a true picture of negro life in negro dialect was Irwin Russell of Mississippi. He was certainly the first to make use of verse to put before us the negro as he saw him. Russell's negro is for the most part not the slave but the negro who is reconstructed in his legal relations, but altogether unreconstructed in habits of thought and of action. That negro, a picture of whom was to be had only during the decade immediately after the war, is the hero of much of Russell's verse. That he has pictured the character faithfully is evidenced by the fact of the life of his work. Despite encouragements to die, the slender volume of posthumous verse still lives and seems destined to have permanent place in American literature.

Russell's place in our literary history does not depend solely on the estimation put on his own work but is assured by the fact of his influence on those he preceded in this new field. Joel Chandler Harris was one of the first to recognize the genius of Russell and he doubtless looks upon the power of the young poet as one of the formative influences of his life. Likewise Thomas Nelson Page delights to ascribe to the Bard of the Quarters the inspiration of his own literary life.

It will be remembered that in sketching the English Romantic Movement the fact was recorded that the boys Warton and Chatterton occupied a place of prescience with regard to these new ideas. It will be worth while calling to mind that Irwin Russell's relation to the Southern Romantic Movement was much the same. Already at sixteen years of age, he had begun to write and ten years later he had completed his work and returned his talents to him who gave them.

The parallel to be drawn between the life of Chatterton and of Russell is interesting if not suggestive of actual brotherhood of thought.

As mere boys they both began to write verse. They both made use of a medium other than mother tongue. Chatterton manufactured for himself a speech we cannot do better than describe as the Rowley dialect; Russell put into form the rude speech of the negro with whom he had grown up; yet he had no help in the difficult work of transcriber.

Chatterton found the tasks set for him in a lawyer's office unbearable while there was poetry in his mind to be written down; Russell was actually admitted to the bar but the Muse of Letters had marked him for her own and the courtroom knew him no more. Breaking away from the bondage of legal drudgery, Chatterton went with high hopes from Bristol to London where for a few short months "the unhappy boy" strove against starvation only at last to be overcome in the struggle for living.

Russell left Port Gibson and went to New York to enter upon a literary life but after buffetings not a few, he at last entered into the eternal rest not vouchsafed on earth to that weary, outworn body.

Chatterton may be granted place as forerunner of that noble body of poets who have had part in making the poetry of the Nineteenth Century as distinct contribution to English literature. Before Irwin Russell there were, indeed, fore-gleams of the day that was to dawn, but it may not unfairly be urged that he was the first to turn his camera on one section of our Southern life and give us a picture that has cause to be enumerated among the monuments which must be consulted as primary authorities by the historian who will picture the life and thought of the Southern people.

[WILLIAM WARD, A MISSISSIPPI POET ENTITLED TO DISTINCTION.]
BY DABNEY LIPSCOMB

A gentleman of advanced age, ripe culture, and extensive knowledge of the literature of the State, was asked, "Who is the best poet Mississippi has produced?" Promptly he replied, "William Ward of Macon." Respect for the opinion of the one who so unhesitatingly adjudged this pre-eminence among the poets of the State led to a study of William Ward's life and poetry, the result of which is now presented.

At the outset, however, let it be understood that the purpose of this essay is not to establish Mr. Ward's supremacy as a poet. Classifications of this kind in literature and elsewhere are generally unsatisfactory and often invidious, for excellencies that vary greatly in kind are not to be measured in degree. Some would doubtless accord pre-eminence to Irwin Russell for his humorous, sympathetic pictures of the quaintly sage and irrepressibly happy old-time plantation negro. Others would as likely claim this honor for James D. Lynch of West Point, who, against over two hundred poets of America, won for himself and his State, by unanimous vote of the committee of awards, the proud distinction of welcoming the nations of the world to the great Columbian Exposition, and afterward of having his salutation ode adopted as the Press Poem of America. Of him and his works more will be said on another occasion. Other classes in attempts at gradation would prefer this one or that one for reasons as different as the peculiar merits of the poet or the tastes of the admirers.

Panegyric cannot perpetuate a reputation. If so, Tupper, whose fame was predicted, would live as long as the language, would now be more than a name. Joanna Baillie, too, whom even Sir Walter Scott describes as sweeping her harp

Till Avon's swans—
Awakening at the inspired strain,
Deemed their own Shakespeare lived again,

—where is she? Mindful of the futility of claiming for an author more than is warranted, no eulogy will be offered, extravaganza will be avoided. On the contrary, that criticism will be eschewed which "damns with faint praise" what is cordially admired, fearful lest others may not assent. William Ward and his poems shall speak largely for themselves; knowledge of the man and his work being sufficient, it is believed, to justify the claim that he is a poet entitled to distinction.

Like many others who have reflected honor on the State, he was a son of Mississippi by adoption, a New Englander by birth. Son of William and Charlotte Ward, he was born in August, 1823, at Litchfield, Connecticut, an historic village, the early home of the Beechers; once noted also for its famous law school, attended by many from the South, John C. Calhoun among the number. Scarcely less was it famous for the beauty of the surrounding scenery and for the aristocracy of its leading families, who boasted their descent from old English houses as much as did the Virginians of their Cavalier and the Carolinians of their Huguenot ancestry. Social aristocracy in New England was a more prominent feature of life there than is commonly supposed. Among the leading families of Litchfield was that of the Wards. William, father of the subject of this sketch, was a jeweler by occupation, a man of integrity and unusual intelligence; wealthy until middle life, when it appears that reverses overtook him. For this reason his children, excepting one, perhaps, did not receive a college education as was intended. John became an Episcopal clergyman; Elias a jeweler, like his father; Henry, sorely disappointed in not being able to attend Yale College, scholarly, poetic, took reluctantly to printing an editorial work; Mary Charlotte, literary in her tastes, married a wealthy gentleman, traveled in Europe, and wrote sketches of travel and a number of poems. Of Henry Ward, a word more in passing to indicate more fully the literary leaning of the family. At the age of thirteen, his poem, "Novel Reading; or The Feast of Fiction," published in the local paper, gave him notoriety and raised great expectations. Thwarted in his college aspirations looking toward the ministry, he grew melancholy and excessively reserved. After forty years of life as a practical printer and editor, he left at his decease manuscripts in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, versification of the Books of Job and Lamentations, and a volume of hymns. His claim to the well-known hymn, "I Would Not Live Always," generally accredited to William Augustus Muhlenberg, and also to the poem, "Tell Me Ye Winged Winds," usually ascribed to Charles Mackay, is set forth in Harpel's Poets and Poetry of Printerdom. In it, too, may be found other poems by him and several by his sister Mary, then Mrs. Webster.

But to William Ward, the youngest son, attention must now be turned exclusively, with a glance first at the brief but important period of his life spent in his boyhood home. Of those early days which evidently left deep impression on his after life, less can be said than could be wished. The beauty of the country about Litchfield must have impressed him as it did Henry and Harriet Beecher, born amid the same surroundings, ten or twelve years before him. Like them, no doubt, he gazed with delight on the glorious sunsets which Mrs. Stowe so enthusiastically describes, and roamed in perhaps the same mood the woods in which they speculated whether Apollo had not there once built his altars. He, too, wandered along the banks of crystal Bantam River and dreamily watched the clouds as they hooded and un-hooded Mount Tom in the hazy distance. Nature there surely must have been "meet nurse for a poetic child."

His scholastic education was completed under the tuition of a learned Episcopal clergyman whose private academy for boys was well patronized. He was an insatiable reader and a fairly good student, though his mind ran in literary lines rather than to the study of the exact sciences. The classics he must have especially preferred, and in them been carefully instructed, judging from the familiarity he manifests in his poems with the mythology and literature in general of Greece and Rome. Astronomy seems to have laid strong hold upon him; for it held high place in his esteem in later life. He early gave evidence of a poetic tendency, and some of his boyish effusions are said to have possessed considerable merit. Intuition, environment, and reading apparently combined to make of this New England lad a poet. What the experiences of active life contributed in this direction, a look ahead will show.

When only sixteen years of age, a great and unexpected change in his plans and prospects occurred. He was urged by his brother Elias who had gone South and set up in business at Columbus, Mississippi, to come and learn under him the watch repairing and jewelry business. Though his tastes and aptitudes led in opposite direction, the opening seemed too favorable to be set aside. The invitation was accepted and bidding adieu forever to the home of his love, with mingled enthusiasm and trepidation the young man set out on his long journey to the South. Embarking at New York on a sailing vessel, he reached Mobile, Alabama, after a safe but lengthy voyage. Of the experiences of that voyage which afterward gave coloring to some of his most poetic lines and of the amusing incident attendant upon his arrival at Mobile notice cannot now be taken.

Ten or twelve years of quiet busy life at Columbus, Mississippi constitute the second distinct period in William Ward's comparatively uneventful life. His letters home indicate that many of the sights and incidents connected with life in that almost frontier land were new and startling to the scholarly youth from staid Connecticut. By degrees he became accustomed to his surroundings, and identified himself with the society and business of the place. Modest and reserved in public, with his friends he was ever a genial and interesting companion. More student than mechanic, he would doubtless have preferred a literary career. As it was, his literary tendency continued to assert itself, and before attaining his majority verses from his pen began to appear in print. At twenty or earlier he became a contributor to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, to which for ten years or more thereafter he continued to furnish poems or themes chiefly classical and patriotic. First in order of time of those that have been preserved is "The Grave of Hale," which appeared in the issue of June 3, 1843. In smooth and vigorous Spenserian stanzas, he protests against the neglect of the martyr-patriot's grave.

"Alas! and hath no gentle honoring hand,
But that of Nature decked his tomb with flowers,
We mourn the heroes of some storied land,
And leave a cold and barren grave to ours."

Among other published poems of his early period indicative of his devotion to the classic Muse, and of his ardent patriotism, may be named "The Egean," "Greece," "The Bellman of '76," and "Our Own New England."

These lines from the first two poems, written respectively in 1844 and 1845, but for the dates might seem to have been inspired by the result of the late sad struggle between the Greeks and Turks:

"Bright sea! no more the naiad haunts
Thy pearl founts with a syren spell,
No sea-nymph on thy foam-bed pants,
Within her rainbow spawning cell,
The halo of departed years—
Sleeps like a dream upon thy sky,
While the dark curse of blood and tears
Is echoed back with freedom's sigh."

"Oh Greece! could ye but boast of Greeks the shame
That gathers o'er thee now would make thy altars flame."

For the tenderness and warmth of sentiment expressed therein, the poem, "Our Own New England," merits more than simple reference to it. The last stanza shows how thoroughly Southern in ten years he had become. Friendships strong and lasting had been formed, and he was now prominent among the citizens of a town that even then prided itself on its culture. One of the intimate friends of Alexander K. McClung, he has left an appreciative tribute to that powerful, but somber and erratic genius.

In 1850 Mr. Ward removed to Macon; Mississippi, and there lived till his death in 1887. Early in the fifties he married Miss Emilie A. Whiffen, an estimable and highly cultured young lady of English parentage, then teaching in a female institute at Crawford, Miss. The Philadelphia Courier contained a pleasant notice of the marriage, from which this extract is taken: "We sincerely congratulate our esteemed correspondent, William Ward, Jr., Esq., whose delightful verses have enriched but too seldom our Poet's Corner, upon the agreeable fact reported in our hymeneal department last week." These were his halcyon days, during which he was prosperous and serenely joyful in his home. In 1856, he built in the woods skirting the eastern edge of the town the modest but tasteful little cottage in which he spent the remainder of his days. To verse he seems to have given but little time during those busy years; though occasionally he still contributed a poem to the Courier and to the Macon and Columbus papers. Three daughters and a son came to increase his pleasures and his cares. Meanwhile the war cloud lowered and the tempest broke in fury on the land he had learned to love and call his own. But this was little heeded in comparison with the calamity which befell him in the midst of those dreadful days in the loss of his devoted and helpful wife. His life "cleft in twain," as he expressed it, from that time forward is thus described by one who knew and loved him: "To his half-orphaned children he became father and mother. We have seen him in his cottage home spending his evenings in the bosom of his little family, assisting his daughters with their lessons, amusing the children, looking after their comfort, and doing all in his power to make them happy. Proud and sensitive, he bravely struggled through poverty that came to so many Southern families; and though at times obliged to add the office of housekeeper to that of bread-winner for his young family, he never sank the dignity of a gentleman to the servility of a drudge."

Under these circumstances, all the more honor is due to him that after the war he spurned the offers of place and wealth extended by carpet-bag leaders of the Republican party who knew of his Northern birth. Instead of such a course, he became in 1870 editor of the Macon Beacon, and was as pronounced a Democrat as he had been Whig in former years. During intervals of work in his little shop he hurriedly wrote his editorials; and might often be seen walking up and down behind the counter evolving a poem or a prose reverie, oblivious to his surroundings. But to poetry he gave no more time than, as he said, he must. Outside the joys of companionship with books and with his children, he could truly have exclaimed with Burns:

"Lease me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure,
My chief, amaist my only pleasure."

With his little ones, on Sundays, he walked in the woods hard by his house; and on clear nights he often pointed out to them the stars and constellations, and told them of the myths that cluster about Orion, the Pleiads and other denizens of the nightly firmament. He had his own telescope and frequently searched the heavens with it for hours. "It is well," he says, "to look upon the Christmas skies when the most glorious constellations of the year are gathered as at the world's great festival. It will give us higher conceptions of life and tone down excesses we too often indulge in through the anniversary week that closes up the year."

But let us look more closely at the man himself and then give his work such examination as time left us will admit. Tall, slender, erect in carriage, clean shaven, with dark brown hair and eyes, rapid in his movements, the scholar and the gentleman written unmistakably on every lineament, and William Ward, the man, is as nearly portrayed as can now be done; for except a little daguerreotype taken for his wife, which has been lost, he sat for no other picture. Singularly reserved and almost shy in public, with his children and with his intimate friends he was delightfully communicative, a vein of quiet humor often outcropping in his words and deeds.

Public life he generally avoided; offices which he might have held, he would not accept, although urged upon him. A loyal, ardent Odd Fellow, like Abou Ben Adhem, he "loved his fellow-man," and was loved by them in turn. His addresses and poems on the anniversaries of this order, and at decorations of the soldiers' graves were much admired. Though educated for an Episcopal clergyman, he never united with the church, at least in the South, more than as a vestryman for a time. It is to be regretted that, with outward eye so quick to see and interpret the true and beautiful, his eyes of faith could not discern more clearly the full truth and beauty of God's written Revelation. If so, his pathetic lines on "Hope," composed a few years after his wife's death, would have had a more triumphant ring than is contained in the last two stanzas. Elsewhere hopes shines brighter and faith soars on stronger wings, as when in his "In Memoriam" poem to his wife, he sings:

"Still for this grief so desolate, so lone,
A solace for unmated hearts is given,
Another hand, another voice hath known
The symphonies of heaven."

In the sixty-fourth year of his age, at the season he loved best, the Christmas-tide, December 27, 1887, the gentle spirit of William Ward softly slipped from its earthly moorings. His body by loving hands was tenderly laid to rest in the cemetery at Macon, his home for nearly two score years.

His spirit still lingers with us, embodied in the songs which he sang, now out of a glad, now out of an aching heart. Well has it been said that a poet least of all needs a monumental pile. The Iliad towers high above the Pyramids, and will outlast them by ages. William Ward has left no Iliad; he sang not of the gods and demi-gods; he struck the lyre, and not the full-resounding harp. Intuition, early environment and scholastic training, as has been shown, combined to make of him a poet. Life's dull and dark experiences seemed to repress but could not suppress in him the "noble rage." Visions of beauty continually flitted in his imagination; music from choirs, visible and invisible, seemed ever to soothe and charm his troubled, lonely heart. Especially in the closing years of his life was poetry a joy and comfort to him. As the burdens of life were shifted to the shoulders of his children, he found more leisure, it appears, and indulged more frequently in poetic expression of the mood or thought that deeply stirred within.

As might be supposed, his poems are of as diverse themes and varied measures as the moods and occasions which suggested them. In them may be best shown the poet and to some extent the man; hence, they deserve and, it is believed, will repay a full and close investigation. Hear him first, as in patriotic strain, he invites the world to his adopted land:

COME TO THE SOUTH.

Come to our hill-sides and come to our prairies,
Broaden our fields with the spade and the plow;
Bring us from Deutsche-land to gardens and dairies,
To household and kitchen the fraulein and frau;
Come from the birth-land of Goethe and Schiller,
Scholar and poet and teacher and priest;
Come where each acre of tilth needs a tiller,
And people the South with the strength of the East;
Bring you the songs and dance of Rhine-land
The legends and sports of your home if you will;
Give us the lays of your forest and vine-land,
With the strong arm of labor the artisan's skill.

Come from the cliffs where the sea-eagle fledges
His brood o'er the wild ocean-storm of the North,
Where the fisher-boats play round the moss-mantled ledges,
Where the sea-kraken sports and the maelstrom has birth;
Leave you the land where the treacherous glacier
Mocks you, blinded and chilled with its pitiless glare,
Where all save the mist-clouded rim of the geyser
In the impotent sunlight lies frozen and bare;
Where Hecla sits mailed like a desolate giant,
With his flame-covered crest and his foot-stool of snow,
O'er the storm-rended realm of the Viking defiant,
And the sea rolling red in his terrible glow.

We call you, O men of the kilt and the tartan,
From highland and lowland, from mountain and mere—
Though you feel for your country the love of a Spartan,
A sunnier home and a welcome is here;
Must you cling to the fields where the gorse and the heather
That bloomed for your grandsires still blossom for you?
Cannot hopes that await you here loosen the tether
Which a birthright descended has cast over you?
There is room, there is work for the peer and the peasant,
From the land of the shamrock, the olive, and vine,
You may lift up unquestioned the cross with the crescent,
Or the lilies of France with the thistle-bloom twine.

No prosy pen could have indited those picturesque and stirring lines.

In his Centennial Hymn, "The Victory of Peace," in "The Blue and the Gray," "Under Two Flags," "Gettysburg" and other poems, his muse dons American colors and echoes the national note of peace and unity.

"Now another flag is o'er us,
And the bitter hate that tore us,
From beneath its shadow falters,
Let us raise the olden altars,
Let us smite the wretch who palters
With the tie that binds forever
Those who lost and won together,
While their banners live in story,
Haloed with a common glory."

GETTYSBURG.
1863

We see those splendid columns sweep
Across the field. Men hold their breath;
Before them frowns the sullen steep,
Before and near is life or death.

* * * * *

They are not such as break and fly,
No laggards droop, no cowards quail,
Those only pause who drop and die
Beneath that storm of leaden hail.

* * * * *

'Tis sunset. For the Blue, a gleam
Of glory fills the dying day;
From clouds above that sunset stream
Another glory for the Gray.

1887

They meet again—not steel to steel,
But hand to hand and breast to breast,
Hailed by the cannon's peaceful peal—
The Blue the host, the Gray the guest.

* * * * *

And so they share—the brave and true,
The glory of that fateful day;
The Gray the glory of the Blue,
The Blue the glory of the Gray.

* * * * *

'Tis sunset. From yon heaven away
Fades every golden, purple hue;
O'er host and guest, the twilight gray
Blends with the evening sky of blue.

In "McMahon at Sedan" he strikes the martial measure with trumpet note. Many more stirring war lyrics could not easily be found.

But his muse was also often pensive, and in that mood he softly sings as if to himself alone. Among the best of these poems of reflection are "A Memory," "Alone," "Nebulae," and "Look Up." In them the visions and the melody evoked are often strangely beautiful and haunting; but a depressing undertone like a sigh runs through them all.

The misty realm of dream-land lies before me,
O Sleep! in thine embrace,
What shadows from the past are flitting o'er me,
What mocking memories traced;
The dim procession, slowly wafted onward,
Prolongs the dreary moan
That finds an echo in that fated one word,
Alone! Alone!

From "The Master Thought" and "If Tongues Were Steel," the conclusion might be drawn that a cynic set words to the tunes. The last stanza of the first of these is keenly pointed and sadly near the truth:

"Still man, though born a Socrates or Nero,
If white with truth, or black with falsehood's taint,
Would rather gleam in marble as a hero,
Than glow on canvas, pictured as a saint."

His intense hatred of shams and fraud of every kind occasionally found indignant voice; as

"O God! were all the lies distilled
From supple lips in cunning skilled,
Hell would be stretched and overfilled;
Aye, moulded in one burning curse,
'Twould wreck a shaken world; nay worse!
Would crush and damn a universe."

But these were transient and rare utterances. "Though far from the east the youth had traveled, he still was Nature's priest." The boy dreamer among the Connecticut hills is now a poet on the Southern prairies.

"And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended."

"The glory had not yet passed from earth." Nature beckoned him continually, and gladly obedient to the summons, he sought her haunts, caught the visions, heard her minstrelsies, and forgot the while his burdens, his loneliness, and his long sorrow. Many of his poems in whole or part might be cited in proof of this. Most prominent are "The Dying Year," "The South Wind," and "The Night Storm."

For its rich setting and striking presentation of a common theme this poem is reproduced entire:

THE DYING YEAR.

The year is dying as the dolphin dies,
Not with the ashen hue,
Death's signal color, ere the fading eyes
See dimly, darkly through
The waxen lids. No pallor creeps along
The earth and sky; no tone
Floats through the air like a funeral song,
Or like a dying groan.

The warm rich sunlight gilds the autumn trees
Whose gorgeous tints are spread,
Each toning each, and fringed with heraldries
Of purple, gold, and red
The crimson myrtle burns upon its stem
As though a heart of fire,
The yellow maple, like an oriflamme,
Lifts up its banner higher.

The oak is rich with russet, bronze and brown,
And there a purple crest
Gleams o'er the forest like a lifted crown
Some color-god has blest.
Loosed by the frost, the sumac's pallid leaves
Like yellow lance-heads fall,
While lights and shadows ever shifting weave
A net-work over all.

O queenly autumn! though you proudly lead
The old year to its death,
A glory comes and goes where'er you tread
With every dying breath,
The year is dying—dying as a king
Dies in his purple. Now
His shroud is woven, and its colors fling
A glory o'er his brow.

The cold, the night, the storm, were especially congenial to him. He almost literally "kept open house" throughout the year; for he would hardly permit his doors to be closed even in the coldest weather. On his gallery he delighted to stand or walk and watch a thunder storm, especially by night, as his graphic picture of "The Night Storm" fully testifies. But nature in her gentler aspects was also at times very attractive to him, as this stanza must suffice to show:

"O warm South Wind! awake and send
Across the sea that breath of thine,
And let its lotus fragrance blend
With the rich odor of the pine.
O'er land and sea your treasures bring,
From zones with health and beauty rife,
To youth the fullness of its spring,
To age, the aftermath of life."

Particularly noticeable, and often fascinating through their witchery or weirdness are a number of Mr. Ward's poems. Of those through which fancy sports most winsomely are "The Lake of the Golden Isle," "St. Nicotine, a Christmas Phantasy," "Just Twenty-Two," and "Katie Did."

The last was extensively copied in the press and much admired. It will bear another repetition.

KATIE DID.

Naughty Katie, saucy Katie,
Is your secret aught to me
That you hide it, nor divide it,
In a tree?
In a tree before the trellis,
Where I have a secret hid,
And provokingly you tell us,
Katie did,
Katie didn't,
Yes, she did,
No, she didn't,
Katie did.

Prithee, Katie, by what penance
Are you nightly doomed to be
Trilling to the quiet tenants
Of the tree,
Safely hidden from espial
Of what Katie said or did,
That incessant, shrill denial,
Katie did,
Katie didn't,
Yes, she did,
No, she didn't,
Katie did?

Little disputant, securely
Ambushed, from intrusion free,
Don't I see you so demurely
From the tree,
Peeping through the latticed branches.
Where the moon its arrows slid,
Piping forth with cunning glances,
Katie did,
Katie didn't,
Yes, she did,
No, she didn't,
Katie did?

Will you tell it, Katie, never?
Must it still a secret be?
And forever and forever
From the tree,
Will that answer shrill and lonely
Mock us with the secret hid,
With these accents varied only—
Katie did,
Katie didn't,
Yes, she did,
No, she didn't,
Katie did?

Somewhat more thoughtful but scarcely less charming is the little lyric "Just Twenty-Two," which closes with the plea, "Leave me immortal at sweet twenty-two."

With "The Neophyte" in 1851, the supernatural and mysterious elements, traceable perhaps to Coleridge and to Poe, began to appear in his poems, and became conspicuous in "The Burning Casque," "The Phantom Train," and "The Ride of the Ku-Klux." At places in these, the breath comes short and quick, and the nerves grow unsteady in the presence of grotesque phantoms and direful mysteries. Few pass a real train without a pause and look of mingled awe and admiration. A momentary glance at "The Phantom Train" should certainly be taken:

On the track stood the engine cold and still,
For throttle and valve had ceased to thrill
With the giant power of the wizard steam.
I saw the track, by the lantern's gleam,
Far on the night, till it seemed to meet
In a point at the dim horizon's feet,
And there in the distance, faint and far,
Glimmered a blue and ghostly star.
Nearer and nearer it came and grew,
'Till it gleamed in a circle of ghastly hue.

* * * * *

By the Holy Saints! 'twas a gruesome sight
As ever came from the womb of night—
A spectral train that, nigher and nigher,
Was whirled on its silent wheels of fire.

"The Ride of the Ku-Klux" is even more gruesome and fantastic, but the appearance of those terrible night regulators cannot satisfactorily be shown by a brief extract.

Several poems of personal character deserve notice for both their merit and the associations connected with them. The noble lines to George Peabody may be found in Harpel's "Poets and Poetry of Printerdom," to which reference has been made. In it, too, are published "The Blue and the Gray," "The Frosted Pane," and "The Ride of the Ku-Klux." It is unfortunate that a poem which elicited the following interesting note cannot be designated, perhaps is lost:

New York, March 11, 1872.

Dear Sir:

I thank you for the privilege of reading your beautiful poem, and regret that I could not have been its inspiration. I wrote once a poem for the Atlantic entitled "The Heart of the War," but never one with the title of yours. You will pardon me, I am sure, for relieving you of the burden of a mistake which was very complimentary to me.

Yours very truly,

J. G. Holland.

Shakespeare and Dickens were particular favorites of Mr. Ward's, one of his last purchases of books being a new set of each of these authors. For Byron also, as a poet, he entertained a high regard; but perhaps the literary character whom he loved the most was Oliver Wendell Holmes to whom on his seventy-fifth birthday he addressed an affectionate and admiring tribute, which called forth this response from the genial Autocrat:

Beverly Farm, Mass., Oct. 5, 1884.

My Dear Sir:

I beg you to accept my sincere thanks for your very pleasant lines. I am sorry they were too late for the birthday number of The Critic; for they would have been reckoned among the best and most graceful of all that were sent. Believe me,

Gratefully yours,

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The most popular poem, however, of this class is one dedicated to Wyatt M. Redding, the telegraph operator who during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 bravely died at the post of duty in the plague stricken city of Grenada. For its historical as well as poetical value it should be preserved.

WYATT M. REDDING.
GRENADA, 1878.

Click, Click
Like the beat of a death-watch, sharp and quick,
From hearts that are stifled and lips that are dumb
With the lightning's speed, and the lightning's thrill,
The dark words go and come:
Click, click, and a pulse is still—
There's a form to shroud and a grave to fill,
For the Yellow Death is upon the air,
And the city lies in the clutch of Despair.
Not less a hero than he whose plume
Goes blood-stained down in the conflict's gloom,
Not less a martyr than those who slake
A blood-thirst, bound to the burning stake,
Is he who stands as the last defence
Against the shock of the pestilence.

Click, Click
His heart is strong and his fingers quick,
'Tis a fearful work of hand and brain,
Each click is a groan, each word is a pain,
But he falters not in the fight with death,
Even under his wings as he breathes his breath,
The shrouded city before him lies,
And the dead drop down 'neath the burning skies,
Never a smile, or a word to cheer,
Brightens his eye, or falls on his ear,
All is dreary and all is dumb,
Save the hourly wail from a stricken home.

Click, Click
'Tis the only hope where the dead are thick,
Where the living strewn by the plague's hot breath
Are sown with the ripening seeds of death.
Still, the hero-boy at his key-board stands,
And many a far off city feels
The thrill of the wire, and its mute appeals,
And hands are stretched from the East and West
Their upward palms with a blessing blest,
As it comes to those who meet their doom
Like scorched leaves struck by the hot simoon.

Click, Click
Like the beat of a death-watch, sharp and quick,
'Tis the last note struck, 'tis the first wild touch
He gives the key, as he feels the vague
An creeping chill of the deadly plague.
Ere its burns with the strength of its fever clutch.
He falters, falls, and his work is done,
And the fiend has marked his victim won,
Not long he dallies with those who fall
Beneath the curse of his yellow thrall,
O city, beneath his merciless sway,
Mourn, mourn, for your hero dies today.

Passing several poems of genuine humor and two or three more lengthy ones of epic cast and tragic interest, this appreciation of William Ward's life and poetry, though incomplete must find an end. What poetry in the abstract is, the world has not yet determined, and probably never will. Whether it be "the rhythmical creation of beauty" or the "lyrical expression of emotion," or both; whether its end be truth or beauty or merely sensuous delight, one or all, each will decide for himself, according as he is provincial or cosmopolitan in his culture. What is poetry to one is doggerel or riming prose to another. "The Ring and the Book" is intolerable to many who enjoy "The Idylls of the King." Wordsworth is for the most part childish or meaningless to numbers who delight in Scott or Byron. Where Poe is lauded, Whitman very likely will be scouted.

Individual estimates of William Ward's poems will, therefore, vary according to the tastes and training of the reader. But it can hardly be doubted that they will appeal strongly to a majority of the lovers of true poetry. If imagery be preferred, it is conspicuous throughout his verse; if emotion be specially sought for, it too in almost every type pulsates in these poems; if music be the criterion, in that also they will not be found wanting, for the melody and harmony of most of them is a striking characteristic. That they might be judged on their own merits, and not so much on the opinion of one who might be deemed more advocate than critic, fuller selections by way of illustration have been offered than would have been the case, if the poems could readily be found. They were published mostly in the Philadelphia American Courier, the Macon Beacon, and the New Orleans Times-Democrat, and have not been collected in book form, as it is earnestly hoped they yet will be. Better known, it is confidently believed that they will place their author high on the roll of Southern poets.

As a summary and a conclusion, the following Report of the Committee on Necrology to the Press Convention of Mississippi in 1888 is here appended:

"One of the oldest members of this association, who had not an enemy on earth, the urbane, genial and ever agreeable William Ward is with us no more. Those of us who knew and loved him for his big heart and true manly worth, will sadly miss his gentle footfalls, cheerful face, and warm hand-clasp as we meet in our annual conventions. The voice of him who sang songs of love, devotion, and duty, is as silent as the marble shaft that marks his resting place.

"Born in a New England village up among the hills of old Connecticut in 1823, Mr. Ward came South when a youth of tender years, to seek a home in the land of sunshine and flowers, fit prototypes of his own sunny self. A poet by nature and a writer of purest English, he gave to the press some of the sweetest poetic gems that have graced the literature of the South; and his poems addressed to or read before our press conventions were always regarded as the chief features of an entertainment. With them he was wont 'to set the table in a roar,' or draw tears from the eyes of the most obdurate. He wrote his name high on the scroll of fame, and through all the vicissitudes of life, from the days of his early manhood when struggling to support a growing family to the evening of his declining years when surrounded by the comforts of life, that name remains as pure as a star, as unsullied as the snowflakes falling in mid-heaven. In all the relations of life, William Ward was ever a true and honorable man, loving and beloved by all who came within the circle of his acquaintance.

"Let the recollections of this New England youth who cast his lot with the South, and who lies buried in its soil ever remain fresh and green in our heart of hearts; and now let us pluck a flower from the chaplet of memory, and tenderly lay it upon his hallowed grave."

[SHERWOOD BONNER—HER LIFE AND PLACE IN THE LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH.]
BY ALEXANDER L. BONDURANT, A. M. (HARVARD)

The life of Sherwood Bonner illustrates the union of the subtle elements, ancestral traits and personal qualities, which, distilled by the alchemist, Dame Nature, in her alembic produce the individual.

Her father, Dr. Charles Bonner, was born in Ireland, but his family left their ancestral home when he was quite young, and settled in Pennsylvania. When he arrived at man's estate, he left the North, and like Prentiss and Boyd turned his face Southward. He reached Mississippi in "Flush Times," and was content to dwell there, for he found a cultured, refined people, who recognized in him a kindred spirit.

In her novel, "Like Unto Like," Sherwood Bonner thus describes the home of his adoption: "The climate was delicious. Winter never came with whirl or wind and wonder of piling snow, but as a temperate king with spring peeping to meet him, before autumn's rustling skirts had quite vanished round the corner. Yet there was not the monotony of eternal summer. Winter sometimes gave more than hints of power to the pert knaves of flowers who dared to spring up with a wave of their blooming caps in his face; and the peach-trees that blossomed too soon were apt to get their pale pink heads enclosed in glittering ice-caps, through which they shone with resplendent beauty for a day then meekly died. Even a light snow fell at times; and everybody admired it and shivered at it, and said the climate was changing, and built great wood-fires, and tacked list around the doors, and piled blankets on the beds, to wake in the morning to find sunshine and warmth—and mud. But for the most part, the days, one after another, were as perfect as Guido's dancing hours."

She thus speaks of the people whom both she and her father loved: "They had the immense dignity of those who live in inherited homes, with the simplicity of manner that comes of an assured social position. They were handsome, healthy, full of physical force as all people must be who ride horseback ---- and do not lie awake at night to wonder why they were born. That they were Southerners was, of course, their first cause of congratulation. After a Northern tour they were glad to come home and tell how they were recognized as Southerners everywhere—in the cars, shops, and theatres. They felt their Southern air and accent a grace and a distinction, separating them from a people who walked fast, talked through their noses, and built railroads."

The young physician found the sun which caused the flowers to bud, to blossom, to give forth rich fragrance not less kind to the daughters of the Southern village whither he had journeyed; but one seemed to him fairer than all the rest, and he sought to make her his own. Miss Mary Wilson is said to have been both lovable and beautiful. Fortune favored his wooing so they were soon wedded. Their means were ample and Dr. Bonner retired from the active practice of his profession, dividing his time between the management of his estate, and the dispensing of an elegant hospitality in his own home. He was always a great lover of books and possessed a fine mind, but had no ambition beyond his class; and while believing in and honoring woman to the highest degree, he thought her place to be the home.

His library was large and carefully selected, and he directed in large measure the reading of his family. We surmise that the daughter is giving an episode in her own life when she has Blythe Herndon tell Roger Ellis that she never disobeyed her father's injunction about books but once, that having exhausted everything else in the library, she climbed up to the forbidden shelf and took from it a copy of "Tom Jones." But, says Blythe, "papa scolded; to this day I have never known whether Tom married Sophia." Dr. Bonner was an honorable, courteous, cultured gentleman, another Thomas Dabney. The daughter being asked by Mr. Harper, of Harper and Brothers, where she obtained such a fine command of English, replied with great dignity, "In my father's house."

From her father Sherwood Bonner inherited her love for books, and her keen sense of humor, her best gift from the gods; from her mother came beauty and a charming femininity.

Five children were born to Dr. and Mrs. Bonner; Katharine Sherwood, born February 26, 1849; Ruth Martin, now Mrs. David McDowell, who lives at Holly Springs, Mississippi; Samuel Wilson, who died of yellow fever in '78; and two other children, who died in infancy.

The family residence built by Dr. Bonner is still standing. It is a commodious brick mansion, built in Gothic style, with a wide portico in front, and ample windows opening to the floor. The house stands well back from the street, surrounded by a spacious lawn. One enters a wide hall, and on the left is seen the library, where in winter a wood fire is kept burning. The room is a very charming one, and afforded a most appropriate setting for the writer at her desk. This room is connected with the hall by folding doors. On the right is the drawing-room.

One seeing the fair haired baby-girl in this luxurious, well-ordered Southern home, would probably have said that she was destined to become what her mother before her had been, charming, well read, and, according to prevailing standards, educated. But in addition to these inherited qualities, Sherwood Bonner possessed that strong individuality that made her a writer. As a child she was fond of play, but she loved books and stories better still, and games ceased to charm, if gran'mammy consented to tell her the story of the wonderful adventure of "Breer Rabbit" and "The Tar Baby," or some of his other escapades, or if her papa came in bringing her a fresh volume of fairy stories.

Her first effort at original composition was while she was still wearing pinafores. It came about in this way: she and a playmate lost their temper, and, forgetting that they were little gentlewomen, began to fight like two waifs with no family dignity to uphold. Kate got her frock torn, and later when her mother asked her the cause of the quarrel, she handed her a paper, with a tragic air, saying, "read this, it will tell you all."

She was not universally popular as a child, for she manifested a precociousness that separated her, in large measure, from her kind; but she attracted strongly those whom she really liked and was, at an early age, the queen of a little coterie of her own. In childhood she was distinguished for loyalty, a ready wit and a keen sense of humor; qualities that made the warp and woof of her nature, and but strengthened when the maid was merged in the woman.

Her education was conducted under her father's eye, and as he pressed the chalice to eager lips, little did he guess that he was entertaining genius unawares. At school she could not have been accounted a hard student. Her mind slaked its thirst at the pure fountain of the muses; history was a joy, literature a delight, and the composition, a task hated by most of her schoolmates, a pleasant pastime; but she looked askance at the sciences, and pronounced life too short for geometry. During her last year at school she wrote an allegory. It is the work of a tyro in art, but was regarded by her schoolmates a remarkable production.

The morning of her life was bright, and with father, mother, sister, brother, around the family hearth, each passing day brought added happiness. Even the dark clouds that began to lower in the North, ere she passed the limits of girlhood, did not bring sadness, for she with many older heads in the South failed to comprehend what these foreshadowed. But she was now to receive the baptism of sorrow, and to gain through suffering needed training and added strength.

"Who tears to other eyes would bring
Must first have tasted sorrow."

She was just sixteen, she had written something and it had been accepted, her heart was aglow with visions of the future, when the desolating blow fell upon her home. The much loved mother was taken from her, the rude shock and turmoil of war being too much for that gentle spirit.

We find this entry in Sherwood Bonner's scrapbook in her own hand: "First story ever published, aged fifteen, Boston Ploughman, twenty dollars." Underneath, the story is pasted in. It was called "Laura Capello, A Leaf from a Traveler's Notebook." It is a mystery story, highly melodramatic and crude, but containing the promise of a rich fulfillment as the bud contains the rose. It deals with the lot of a young girl whose life is the fruit of unhallowed love. The scene is laid in Italy, the land of mystery, and the story is given to the world by a young American artist, whom a capricious fate enmeshes, and make an unwilling actor in the drama. The sketch shows dramatic power, and abounds in vivid description.

Mr. Nahum Capen, the author of "The Republic of the United States," "History of Democracy," and other works, was at this time connected with The Ploughman. He was the friend of Longfellow, Lowell and Emerson, and was selected by Hawthorne as the first one to read his first book, which appeared anonymously. He was the intimate friend and adviser also of Irving. Under his tutelage Sherwood Bonner first essayed Grub street, and he never ceased to take a keen interest in her, and was to the day of her death her trusted adviser and friend. He urged her to write, and encouraged her work with kindly, but discriminating words of praise. "Laura Capello" was followed by "A Flower of the South," published in a musical journal. Somewhat later a piece called "An Exposition on one of the Commandments" was sent to Frank Leslie's Journal.

In 1871, Sherwood Bonner became the wife of Mr. Edward McDowell, a gentleman of refinement and liberal culture; like his wife he was a native of Holly Springs. The young wife assumed with earnestness the responsibilities of the new life and when her husband determined to try his fortune in the frontier state of Texas, she went with him into a country that was little better than a wilderness. But the venture failed and the young people returned to Holly Springs poorer in purse than when they left. A daughter was born to them, and for her child henceforth the mother in large measure seemed to live. Like George Sand, she found in motherhood love's deepest expression. At this crisis of affairs, the young wife and mother recalled her talent, and remembering the kind words that had come to her from Boston, she determined to go thither, and try her fortune with her pen. In Boston she became a member of Mr. Capen's family, and under his eye, and with his encouragement, continued her work.

She had the gift of clear vision, and at once perceived that the defects of her early training must be overcome if she was to write that which the world would read; so she studied closely, books, men and manners. The North received her lucubrations with a criticism that was in the main kindly, and ere long she had made for herself a place in "The Moral Lighthouse" as she playfully denominates Boston. After several years she was able to have with her her child and the aunt who since her mother's death had striven to supply her place. But she counted that she was only sojourning in the North. The place of her birth she ever spoke of as "home," and a portion of each year she spent amidst the dear familiar scenes.

Soon after going North she met the poet Longfellow. He recognized her talent, became her warm personal friend, and lent her aid and encouragement in her work. She in turn seemed to impart new vigor to the white-haired poet. She became his private secretary and collaborator. At her suggestion he compiled "Poems of Places, Southern States," and she assisted in this work. It is a quaint conceit of the poet which causes him to treat the South as a separate country. In that interesting book, "Poets' Homes," appears a description of Longfellow's home written by her. It is given the place of honor in the book, but by a strange oversight no credit is given to the author. In one of her early letters from Boston, published in the Memphis Avalanche she writes: "A great man and a poet, who enjoys the additional distinction of being my very good friend, read my first letter written for your columns, with an evident amusement, which he made a commendable effort to suppress. 'This is too bad,' frowned he, between smiles, 'don't do it again. Write about the good side of Boston next time.'"

She wrote a number of letters for Southern newspapers in a style that the ordinary newspaper man would strive in vain to emulate, though she regarded the letters as mere potboilers. They give interesting accounts of the happenings in Boston, and her impressions of Boston's great men: Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Wendell Philips. She says of Boston: "For the native Bostonian there are three paths to glory. If his name be Quincy or Adams, nothing more is expected of him. His blue blood carries him through life with glory and straight to heaven when he dies. Failing in the happy accident of birth, the candidate for Beacon Hill honors must write a book. This is easy. The man who can breathe Boston air and not write a book is either a fool or a phenomenon. One course remains to him should he miss fame in both these lines. He must be a reformer."

She thus speaks of her meeting with Mr. Emerson: "The unaffected charm of Mr. Emerson's manner soon restored me to my normal serenity, and the interview progressed delightfully for both of us. He has the purest and most refined face I have ever seen, and his smile is something to be remembered forever. Of course we spoke of the South, and he expressed the opinion that the Southern man had a more elegant manner and a finer physical frame than the Northerner, but must generally yield the palm in intellect. And to this I assented sorrowfully enough, recalling as I did, the small returns from the stock I took in a certain Philo club, where I spent the ambrosial evenings of my life and pinned my faith to several masculine coat sleeves of intellectual giants pro tempore, who would have brought my tawny hair down in sorrow to the grave—if I hadn't taken the pin out.

"Mr. Emerson has a way of looking off into the distance as he speaks or listens which is very poetic and beautiful. I liked it, but yet I was not happy, for I had a knot of purple violets in my hair, and I distrusted this way of appreciating them. I don't wear violets every day; nor for the Colonel who talks politics to me; nor for the young preacher who propounds chemical conundrums. And so they meant something in this case! perhaps to subtly express the homage of a Southern heart, that I had no skill to put into words. I dare say, however, the great man received a general impression of sweetness and perhaps it is well he did not trace it to outside influences.

"On the whole, Mr. Emerson personally strikes me as one who might falsify that comprehensive saying that no man is a hero to his valet, as I cannot imagine him under any circumstances other than the consistent high-toned man, who beyond all scholarship and learning

'Still may hear without abuse
That Grand old name of gentleman.'"

She thus describes her impressions of Carl Schurz, the occasion on which she saw him being a Sumner memorial meeting: "He is German in accent but not in appearance. His full whiskers are red, not blonde. And his features have none of the Teutonic heaviness, but are rather characterized by the sagacious sharpness of the American. The eulogy was very fine, and repeated bursts of applause testified to the enthusiasm of the audience. Most especially I must note the warm and hearty reception accorded that part of the address in which Mr. Schurz spoke of the noble and manly stand taken by Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi, and paid a just tribute to his brilliant eloquence, which was especially grateful to my Southern pride."

In the following paragraph she gives her Southern readers a pen picture of her poet friend:

"Longfellow was there from his beautiful historic home. Bret Harte calls him his 'ideal poet,' and as one looks upon his gracious, benignant face, framed in silvery hair, and reverently notes the broad thoughtful brow, and the eyes from which love toward all mankind seemed to beam, it is easy to comprehend how the perfect harmony between the man and his works should win from one, a poet himself, the highest praise he could possibly bestow."

In her stories Longfellow suggested that she write of the life around her, but she chose, and wisely, the life of the South that she knew best, and the poet admitted in the end that her instinct had led her aright. Before '76 she wrote some of the "Gran-mammy Stories" and other short sketches that found a ready sale. Longfellow said that she would be "the American writer of the future."

Eleven years after "Laura Capello" was written its author visited the scenes where the plot was laid. She enjoyed deeply this foreign travel, and has left a partial record of it in her letters published in Boston and Southern papers, and in her private correspondence. She writes thus to a friend from Rome: "I am living every hour, never have I known days of such enchantment; Roman violets that make the air sweet, Roman fleas that bite with a Swinburne ardor, Roman donkeys that bray in the early morning, Roman shops that bewilder with their gems, shopmen who will make you buy whether you will or no; even in these delights I revel, so what can I say of the pictures, the statues, the ruins of Rome? Do you remember how my Lilian exhausted her raptures after the first layer of her box, and sat afterwards in a mute adoring ecstasy? Think of Lilian's mother in the same position."

Several days were spent by her party at a little coast town in France. At times the hours lagged, so the little group, like the young people in the Decameron, devised game and story to amuse themselves. Sherwood Bonner showed herself the most fruitful of device, and became the leader in the sport. She devised a game that was played with avidity. The loser each time was supposed to pay the forfeit by taking his life with his own hands. A wan young Scotsman who had been "Ordered South" chanced to be one of the party and participated in the game. For the rest it was a pleasing pastime, but for him it had a tragic suggestion, for at that time Robert Louis Stevenson—it was no less than he—had begun that hand to hand conflict with disease that terminated fatally twenty years later. It is thought that he received from this game the suggestion of that very unusual story of his, "The Suicide Club."

Home at last came this busy working bee after her flitting in distant lands. "The Crest of the White Hat," "Rosine's Story," and other sketches show the effect of this foreign travel. The years following were filled with hard work; ever attaining, but never quite satisfied, she strove to make each piece better than the last. During this period she wrote a clever characterization in verse of "The Radical Club," which set all Boston to laughing.

Sometimes she had her hours of despondency as when she wrote a friend, "Put up a tablet for me in case I join the mermaids and write on it,

Death came to set me free,
I met him cheerily
As my true friend."

During the summer of '78 yellow fever raged in many parts of the South. The citizens of Holly Springs with a noble disregard for consequences offered an asylum to the refugees from the stricken town of Grenada; in this way the plague was introduced, and of the first hundred who took the fever only ten survived.

Sherwood Bonner was in the North at the time, but she at once hurried to Holly Springs to urge her loved ones to seek a place of safety. But the old physician would not go and his son remained with him; they were soon stricken with fever; she nursed by their bedside during the weary hours of their sickness and they died in her arms on the same day. She escaped the disease, but left Holly Springs broken in health from her constant vigils, and wounded in spirit. She wrote an account of the plague for The Youth's Companion, from which the following extract is taken: "It is not alone to see loved ones die; it is to dread their dying kiss. It is not to watch the dear dead face until the coffin lid is closed above it, but to turn, shuddering, from the face where you can see waves of change follow each other, until it has become a yellow transfigured mask. It is not to see the folded hand clasping flowers, the dear forms enshrouded in fresh grave-clothes, nor to see them laid away with prayers uttered above them and friends standing by with uncovered heads, but it is to know—with what intensity of horror!—that these forms are changed to a poison so deadly, that death can be tasted in the air around them, and love itself shrinks from rendering its last sad offices. It is to know that they are buried, wrapped hastily in sheets, sometimes uncoffined, hurried to deep graves, without friends, or mourners, or care, by hirelings, who slight and dread their task."

After the publication of "Like unto Like" she found ready publishers. Mr. Conant, the editor of Harper's Weekly, said to her, "I accept your articles now without reading them in advance, your signature is enough." Enduring fame was hers if she could only live to grasp it, but ere the noon hour was reached, the worker was laid low. She began to feel the approach of an insidious disease, which she strove in vain to throw off. Not wishing to distress her loved ones she spoke of it to only a few friends, who finally persuaded her to consult the best medical authority. The physician when he saw her perfect physique expressed his surprise at her coming. He made the examination, but hesitated to state the result. She would have the whole truth and he pronounced her death sentence, telling her that she had but a single year of life. She met her fate with fortitude, and determined to make the most of the few remaining months, in order to provide a competency for the loved ones that she must soon leave.

She worked on to the very gates of death, her courage never forsaking her; and even when her good right hand was useless she continued to dictate to an amanuensis, and was satisfied with nothing short of the best work.

February 14, 1883, she wrote:

A LONGED-FOR VALENTINE

Come to my aching heart, my weary soul,
And give my thoughts once more their vanquished will;
That I may strive and feel again the thrill
Of bounding hope, to reach its fartherest goal.
Not Love, though sweet as that which Launcelot stole,
Nor Beauty, happy as a dancing rill,
Nor Gold poured out from some fond miser's till,
Nor yet a name on Fame's immortal scroll—
But what I ask, O gracious Lord, from Thee,
If to Thy throne my piteous cry can reach,
When stricken down like tempest-riven tree,
Too low for prayer to wreak itself in speech,
Is but the fair gift—ah, will it e'er be mine?
My long lost Health for my dear Valentine.

A dear friend writes of the closing days of her life: "During her hours of suffering, her bravery, her patience, and her heroism were extraordinary. One who watched by her dying bed said: 'I have seen her smile when it would have been a relief to see her cry.' She uttered no complaint and no one heard her repine. One day she gaily asked her friends what would be a suitable inscription for her tomb-stone; and from several that had been suggested she selected this, 'She was much loved.' Surely no words could furnish a more fitting epitaph for the young life that had done so much, enjoyed so much, suffered so much, in a little more than thirty years." The end came July 22, 1883.

Sherwood Bonner cast the witchery of her personal charm over all who surrounded her. Nature formed her to command, to love and to be loved. In childhood she was slight, but in womanhood she possessed a perfect physique. Hers was no usual beauty; her features were refined, but not regular: her complexion a delicate pink and white; expressive blue eyes, her hair an indescribable shade of auburn and very heavy; an exquisite mouth and chin; and a hand that would have been a sculptor's joy.

The poet Longfellow in a poem dedicated to her thus describes her:

"A cloud-like form that floateth on with the soft undulating gait
Of one who moveth, as if motion were a pleasure."

Her heart was always true to the friends of her youth, and when they visited the North she was ever ready to introduce them to the circle of which she was so prominent a member. Adulation did not spoil her for she had the artist's perception with her woman's heart. Hers was a trenchant tongue and a stinging wit, but like the Venusian bard she was quite as ready to hold up her own foibles to ridicule as those of others.

She lived for her child, and nothing from her pen is more charming than the references to her in letters to friends, hitherto unpublished. In one of them she writes: "Now for my baby, she certainly is the most perfect child in the world. No human being knows how I love the little thing. Every plan of my life bears upon her future, and so long as she is left me, nothing can ever make me unhappy again."

We may not judge of her literary work as of a finished product. It is rather like a sculptor's dream that is but half realized. Lips are parted as if for speech, eyes look wistfully towards the East; but the figure is still restrained in its marble prison, and we wonder why the sculptor was stricken, the task unfinished.

But this unfinished work was fraught with rich promise. She probably wrote the first story of any writer that belongs to the distinctively Southern school. She wrote before '77 some of "The Gran'mammy Stories," and these seem to be the first negro dialect stories published in a Northern journal, and thus speaking to the whole country. She wrote in '78 "Like unto Like," a story that has to do with the reconstruction period. Into this field Cable came later, and Page selected it as a fitting period in which to locate his most ambitious work, "Red Rock." Only one writer before her had attempted to work this virgin soil, Baker in "Colonel Dunwoddie, Millionaire." In this book she refers to the "Tar Baby Story," which she published several years later in Harper's Monthly. She wrote some excellent dialect stories of the Tennessee mountains, thus doing pioneer work in a field which Miss Murfree has made so peculiarly her own. She spent some time beginning in 1880, in that portion of Illinois known as Egypt; and "On the Nine-Mile," and "Sister Weeden's Prayer" illuminate this dark world. These stories and a number of others were written in the dialect peculiar to this region. Of "Sister Weeden's Prayer" in the "new" dialect The Nation spoke in most complimentary terms. She seems to have been the first to give to the vernacular of this region literary treatment, thus doing for Illinois what Eggleston and Riley have done for Indiana.

Her principal writings may be grouped as follows: Early pieces, '64-'73;—Letters from Boston and Europe, '74-'76;—Short Stories published in periodicals between '73 and '83; a number of these were collected after the death of the author and reprinted in a volume entitled "Suwanee River Tales"[1] (There are many excellent sketches in this little book, but the best are those in which Gran'mammy figures); to this period of her life belong "Miss Willard's Two Rings,"[2] and "From '60 to '65"[3];—"Like unto Like,"[4] a novel, "The Valcours,"[5] a novelette, "The Revolution in the Life of Mr. Balingall,"[6] "Two Storms,"[7] "A Volcanic Interlude,"[8] appeared between '78 and '83. She wrote during these years besides, a number of dialect stories dealing with negro character, the mountaineers of East Tennessee, and the denizens of the Western prairie. "Hieronymus Pop and the Baby," "The Case of Eliza Blelock" and "Lame Jerry" are all strong sketches. Some of these stories have appeared in book form.[9]

The "Gran'mammy Stories"[10] reveal with force and beauty the characteristics of the old Southern "mammy," who deserves a modest place with "The chaste and sage Dame Eurycleia" and fair Juliet's nurse; and Sherwood Bonner has made posterity her debtor by preserving the lineaments of this picturesque personage whose place formerly was of so much consequence in the Southern home. But let the author unfold her character:

"In our Southern home we were very fond of our old colored mammy, who had petted and scolded and nursed and coddled, —— yes, and spanked us,—from the time we were born."

She was not a 'black mammy,' for her complexion was the color of clear coffee; and we did not call her 'mammy' but 'gran'mammy' because she had nursed our mother when a delicate baby,—loving her foster child, I believe, more than her own, and loving us for our dear mother's sake.

She was all tenderness when we were wee toddlers, not more than able to clutch at the great gold hoops in her ears, or cling to her ample skirts like little burrs; but she showed a sharper side as we grew old enough to 'bother round the kitchen' with inquisitive eyes and fingers and tongues. I regret to say that she sometimes called us 'limbs' and would wonder with many a groan and shake of her head, how we contrived to hold so much of the Evil One in our small frames.

"'I never seed sich chillern in all my born days,' she cried one day, when Ruth interrupted her in the midst of custard making, to beg leave to get into the kettle of boiling soap that she might be clean once for all, and never need another bath; while Sam, on the other side, entreated that she would make three 'points' of gravy with the fried chicken for dinner. (Sam always came out strong on pronunciation; his very errors leaned to virtue's side.)

"'I 'clar to gracious,' said poor gran'mammy, 'you'll drive all de sense clean outen my head. How Miss Mary 'xpec's me ter git a dinner fitten fur white folks ter eat, wid you little onruly sinners furever under foot, is mo' dan I kin say. An' here's Leah an' Rachel, my own gran-chillern, a no mo' use ter me dan two tar babies.'

"As gran'mammy grew older, her manner softened; her love was less fluctuating. It was she to whom we ran to tell of triumphs and sorrows; she whose sympathy, ash-cakes and turnover pies never failed us. It was she who hung over our sickbeds; who told us stories more beautiful than we read in any books; who sang to us old-fashioned hymns of praise and faith; and who talked to us with childlike simplicity of the God whom she loved.

"During the troubled four years that swept like the hot breath of the simoon over our country, she was true to the family. Her love, courage, her faithful work, helped us to bear up under our heavy trials. And when the gentle mother whose life had been set to such sweet music that her spirit broke in the discords of dreadful war, sank out of life, it was in gran'mammy's arms that she died; and neither husband nor children mourned more tenderly for the beautiful life cut short."

"How Gran'mammy Broke the News" shows the tact of the faithful old nurse in revealing to "Aunt Sarah" the fact that her soldier son, who was reported to have been killed in battle, is alive and well, in fact has but a few moments before arrived at that house. One of gran'mammy's foster children is a witness of the scene. The little girl was for going to tell her aunt as soon as her cousin arrived, but gran'mammy said: "Stop, honey, stop; Miss Katie, you forgit. Don't you know dat joy itse'f is sometimes more dan a breakin' heart kin bear? Mis' Sarah is mighty frail; an' she mus' be made ready to meet dis shock, for dis is jes as much a shock as de lie dat struck her down. Blessed be de Lord for sendin' de last so quick on de heels of de fust. * * * *

"Aunt Sarah's door was ajar. She was seated by the fire in an attitude of utter dejection. Gran'mammy was bustling about the room, an expression of perplexity on her dear old brown face. Presently with a side-long glance at poor Aunt Sarah, gran'mammy began to sing softly. I had never heard her croon anything but Methodist hymns. Now, to my surprise, she broke forth in a chant that Miss Rose was very fond of singing with us after vesper service Sunday afternoons, 'Praise de Lord, O my soul! O my soul; and forget not all his benefits.'

"At first Aunt Sarah took no notice; but, at a louder, more vigorous, 'Praise de Lord, Praise de Lord!' she shook her head, as if a gnat was buzzing about her ears, and looked at the singer with a dull look of surprise in her weary eyes.

"'Gran'mammy singing!' she said, in a faint voice.

"Gran'mammy came and stood directly in front of my aunt. She tried to laugh, but the tears tumbled out of her eyes so fast that she choked in the effort to swallow them.

"'Why, yes, Mis' Sarah,' she at last manged to say; 'when my heart is light with thinkin' of de goodness of de Lord I can no mo' help singin' dan if I was a saint in heaven worshippin' at de throne.'

"'The goodness of God!' echoed Aunt Sarah, drearily; 'He has forgotten mercy; He has turned His face from me; He has left me desolate and forsaken in my old age.'

"'De Lord never forgits,' said gran'mammy, solemnly; 'an' He never fails to keep de promises He has made. Lean on me, Mis' Sarah. Rest yo' po' tired head. Speak de name of yo' boy, honey. It'll do yer good ter talk about him.

"'No, no, no!' said Aunt Sarah, shrinking back; 'I thought you loved him, gran'mammy, but you could come to my room and sing. Go away, I do not want you.'

"'I'll go, Mis' Sarah, in one little minute. Love Mars' Allan! Why, wusn't my arms de fust ter hol' him—a little soft helpless innocent—even before you held him to yo' own mother's heart? An' from that very minnnit I loved him. I kin see him now, a little white-headed boy, always runnin' ter his ole granmammy fur turnovers an' ginger-cakes. Hevn't I watched him all through de years, growin' as straight an' tall as a young poplar, full of his jokes, but with never a mean streak in him, bless de Lord! An' den, Mis' Sarah, don't you mind how he looked in his grey uniform, wid de gold lace on his sleeves; an' how his eyes would kindle an' his voice ring out when he talked of de country he loved next ter God?'

"'Gran'mammy! do you want to break my heart? Why do you torture me?' And Aunt Sarah burst into such wild, wild tears that I was frightened.

"'Oh! my po' sweet mistis, I wants to mend yo' heart, not break it;' and gran'mammy, too, burst into tears, kneeling now by Aunt Sarah, with her arms around her. 'I wants you to call ter mind jes' one thing—de commandment given by de Lord to his people, given wid a promise. Kin you say it over ter me?"

"'Honor thy father and thy mother,' said Aunt Sarah, like one in a dream, 'and thy days shall be long in the land—'

"'Stop dar, Mis' Sarah,—stop at dat promise,' almost shouted gran'mammy. 'Did Mars. Allan honor his father an' his mother?'

"'Always! Always! He never disobeyed us in his life. No son could have been better or nobler.'

"And thy days shall be long in the land," cried gran'mammy, 'which the Lord thy God giveth thee!' Now, Miss Sarah, jes trust God. He won't break dat promise.'

"Words cannot do justice to the solemnity, the yearning tenderness, the pathetic earnestness, that made the dear old woman like one inspired. Wave after wave of feeling rolled over her face. I do not know how to express it, but a sacred, even a religious rapture seemed to hold her in its possession. Strong feeling had exalted her, I felt as if I should like to steal in and pray beside her. She still knelt, but she kept her arms about the frail figure in the arm-chair.

"Wild, vague suspicions were evidently forming in Aunt Sarah's mind. She looked at gran'mammy—a piteous, agonizing gaze. But gran'mammy's eyes met hers with steady joy.

"'What do you mean?' she gasped huskily. 'In God's name, what do you mean?'

"'I mean,—lean on me, dear, lean on me,—I mean dat if our blessed Lord wus on earth today, an' we could kneel at his feet askin' de life of our boy, he could not give it ter us. For Allan's grave has not been dug, an' Allan is livin' not dead today.'

"'What have you heard?'

"'A messenger has come.'

"Then I saw a transformation. Aunt Sarah sprang up, the color and light flashing into cheeks and eyes, the vigor and erectness of youth restored to her shrunken and bowed figure. No longer a haggard old woman,—like a girl she threw open the door, and swept past me without a word."

"Gran'mammy's Last Gifts" has to do with the closing hours of her life.

The children that the old nurse had tended from infancy now gather around her bed. She had her daughter look in her chest and take from it a parcel. "The parcel was handed her, and taking off the outer covering, a white one was revealed; then a third wrapper of silver paper. Slowly, reverently, she unwound this; and there were two tiny, high-heeled satin slippers, yellow with age, but dainty enough for fairy feet.

"'De night your mother was married, honey,' said gran'mammy proudly, "nobody waited on her but me. I unlaced de fine weddin' dress,—all lace an' satin,—an' I put de white nightgown over her head. An' when I took de slippers off her slim pretty feet, she flung her white arms aroun' my neck, an' she says, "keep 'em gran'mammy, in memory o' dis night." An' now, my chile, arter all dese years, I gives em ter you' de fustborn, your dead mother's weddin' slippers.'

"I could not speak for my tears. Was there ever a gift so delicately bestowed? I pressed the slippers to my heart kissing them and the faithful black hands that had taken them from the little feet so many years ago.

"'Now my little singin'-bird,' said gran'mammy to Ruth, 'I was boun' you should remember me; so I jes' went to de picture man, an' here's my ole black face for you to keep.'

"The likeness was perfect; and as Ruth warmly thanked her she sank back wearily on the pillows.

"'I'm tired now,' she said, "Miss Ruthy, I'd like to hear you sing once more—before I hear de angels on de other side.'

"Ruth hushed her sobs and in her exquisite voice rolled out in those beautiful words:

"Only waiting till the shadows
Have a little longer grown,
Only waiting till the glimmer
Of the day's last beam is flown;
Only waiting till the angels
Open wide the mystic gate,
At whose feet I long have lingered,
Weary, poor and desolate."

"'Only waitin', murmured the dying voice. 'O my chillern!" and she spoke with sudden energy. 'In your hearts you are pityin' your poor ole gran'mammy; you are thinking o' de sun shinin' outside, an' de fllowers, an' home an' love. You see me lyin' here, ole, an' black, an' racked wid pain. But oh! what's de sunlight of earth to de glory roun' de throne of God? what's de flowers here ter de flowers in de gyardin younder? An' what's de love of earth ter dat waitin' for me, sinful an' onworthy though I am?

And with her beloved nurslings around her gran'mammy passed quietly away. Amongst her last words were, "Good-by Miss' Marthy, take good keer o' Miss' Mary's chillren."

"Two Storms," one of her latest stories, published in Harper's Monthly, deserves especial notice.

The story has to do with the gulf coast. We see a fair young wife with a husband who idolizes her, and a little daughter with her faithful black mammy. The mother dies suddenly, and the husband is felled by the blow. In his despair he curses Fate and would die. His child he neglects, in fact her presence is disturbing, since it but serves to remind him of his irreparable loss.

Little Dinah's lot is a hapless one. It would be tragic were it not for the devoted old nurse, who watches over her "Shorn Lamb" with a tenderness not to be surpassed by a mother. "'I wish I were a little dog' she said once to Maum Dulcie, 'then I could lick papa's hand, and perhaps he would pat my head.'

"'You po' little sweet rosebud!" cried the old woman, 'Ain't you got yo' ole nuss to love you an' pet you?'