She later embarked with her husband for New York, and it was her pen that so vividly described his death on shipboard. After Dr. Holley's death his widow returned to Lexington, Kentucky, and wrote the memoir for Dr. Charles Caldwell's _Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev. Horace Holley, LL. D._ (Boston, 1828). Mrs. Holley left Kentucky in 1831 and emigrated to Texas under the protection of her celebrated kinsman, General Stephen Fuller Austin, a Transylvania University man, and the founder of Texas. Her _Texas_ (Lexington, Kentucky, 1836), was one of the first histories of that country ever published. Mrs. Holley was a widely read woman, theology being her favorite study, and, like her husband, she was a Unitarian. In person she was said to be a very charming woman. Mrs. Holley spent the last several years of her life at New Orleans, in which city she died on August 2, 1846.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Transylvanian_ (Lexington, January, 1829); Adams's _Dictionary of American Authors_ (Boston, 1905).
TEXAS WOMEN
[From _Texas_ (Lexington, Kentucky, 1836)]
Living in a wild country under circumstances requiring constant exertion, forms the character to great and daring enterprise. Women thus situated are known to perform exploits, which the effeminate men of populous cities might tremble at. Hence there are more Dianas and _Esther Stanhopes_ than one in Texas. It is not uncommon for ladies to mount their mustangs and hunt with their husbands, and with them to camp out for days on their excursions to the sea shore for fish and oysters.
All visiting is done on horseback, and they will go fifty miles to a ball with their silk dresses, made perhaps in Philadelphia or New Orleans, in their saddle-bags. Hardy, vigorous constitutions, free spirits, and spontaneous gaiety are thus induced, and continued a rich legacy to their children, who, it is to be hoped, will sufficiently value the blessing not to squander it away, in their eager search for the luxuries and refinements of polite life. Women have capacity for greatness, but they require occasions to bring it out. They require, perhaps, stronger motives than men--they have stronger barriers to break through of indolence and habit--but, when roused, they are quick to discern and unshrinking to act. _Lot was unfortunate in his wife._ Many a wife in Texas has proved herself the better half, and many a widow's heart has prompted her to noble daring.
Mrs. ---- left her home in Kentucky with her six sons, and _no other jewels_. There was good land and room in Texas. Hither she came with the first settlers, at a time when the Indians were often troublesome by coming in large companies and encamping near an isolated farm, demanding of its helpless proprietors, not then too well provided for, whatever of provisions or other things struck their fancies. One of these _foraging_ parties, not over nice in their demands, stationed themselves in rather too near proximity to the dwelling of this veteran lady. They were so well satisfied with their position, and scoured the place so completely, that she ventured to remonstrate, gently at first, then more vehemently. All would not do: the _pic-nics_ would not budge an inch; and moreover threatened life if she did not forbear from further expressions of impatience. The good woman was _armed_. She buckled on her _breastplate_ of _courage_, if not of _righteousness_, and with her children and women servants, all her household around her, sent for the chief, and very boldly expostulating with him, _commanded_ him to depart on the instant at the peril of his tribe; or by a signal she would call in her whole _people_, numerous and formidable, and exterminate his race. She was no more troubled with the Indians. She lives comfortably with her thriving family and thriving fortune, and with great credit to herself, on the road between Brazoria and San Felipe, in the same house now famed for its hospitality and comfort. It is the usual stopping place for travellers on that route, who are not a little entertained with the border stories and characteristic jests there related, by casual companies meeting for the night and sharing the same apartment. It was thus that the above incident, much more exemplified, was drawn from the hostess herself. A volume of _reminiscences_ thus collected, racy with the marvellous, would not be _unapt_ to modern taste, and the modern science of book-making.
JOHN J. CRITTENDEN
John Jordan Crittenden, a Kentucky statesman and orator of national reputation, was born near Versailles, Kentucky, September 10, 1787. He was graduated from the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, studied law, and was admitted to the Frankfort bar.
Crittenden served in the War of 1812; and in 1816 he was a member of the Kentucky legislature. In the following year he was elected United States Senator from Kentucky, his party, the Whig, then being in power in this State. From 1827 to 1829 Crittenden was United States Attorney for the district of Kentucky; and in 1835 he was again sent to the Senate, with Henry Clay as his colleague. President William Henry Harrison made him his Attorney-General, in 1841, and he resigned his seat in the Senate. When John Tyler succeeded to the presidency six months later, on the death of Harrison, Crittenden withdrew from the cabinet portfolio, and he was almost immediately returned to the Senate by the legislature of Kentucky. He served until 1848, when he was elected Governor of Kentucky. Governor Crittenden was the most distinguished, if not indeed the ablest, chief executive this Commonwealth has ever known. He resigned the governorship, in 1850, in order to become President Fillmore's Attorney-General, which position he held for three years. In 1855 Crittenden was for the fourth time elected United States Senator from Kentucky. As the war between the States approached, Senator Crittenden, though a Southerner, chose the cause of the Union, lining up with the administration heart and soul.
In the beginning he did his utmost to prevent the war, and, failing, he exerted his entire energies to aid Abraham Lincoln and the North to prosecute it. In 1860 the Senator urged his famous Compromise, providing for the reestablishment of the old slave-line of 36' 30 N., and for the enforcement of the fugitive-slave laws, but it was never moulded into law. The last two years of his life were spent as a member of the lower House of Congress, where he continued his fight for the supremacy of the Constitution. Senator Crittenden died near Frankfort, Kentucky, July 26, 1863, thus surviving his greatest friend and fellow patriot, Henry Clay, more than eleven years.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Life of John J. Crittenden_, by Mrs. Chapman Coleman (Philadelphia, 1871); _History of Kentucky_, by R. H.
Collins (Covington, 1882).
EULOGY UPON ASSOCIATE JUSTICE McKINLEY
[From _The Life of John J. Crittenden_, edited by his daughter, Mrs. Chapman Coleman (Philadelphia, 1871)]
At the opening of the court this morning, Mr. Crittenden, the Attorney-General of the United States, addressed the court as follows:
"Since its adjournment yesterday, the members of the bar and officers of the court held a meeting and adopted resolutions expressive of their high sense of the public and private worth of the Hon. John McKinley, one of the justices of this court, and their deep regret at his death. By the same meeting I was requested to present those resolutions to the court, and to ask that they might be entered on its records, and I now rise to perform that honored task.
"Besides the private grief which naturally attends it, the death of a member of this court, which is the head of the great, essential, and vital department of the government, must always be an event of public interest and importance.
"I had the good fortune to be acquainted with Judge McKinley from my earliest manhood. In the relations of private life he was frank, hospitable, affectionate. In his manners he was simple and unaffected, and his character was uniformly marked with manliness, integrity, and honor. Elevation to the bench of the Supreme Court made no change in him. His honors were borne meekly, without ostentation or presumption.
"He was a candid, impartial, and righteous judge. Shrinking from no responsibility, he was fearless in the performance of his duty, seeking only to do right, and fearing nothing but to do wrong. Death has now set her seal to his character, making it unchangeable forever; and I think it may be truly inscribed on his monument that as a private gentleman and as a public magistrate he was without fear and without reproach.
"This occasion cannot but remind us of other afflicting losses which have recently befallen us. The present, indeed, has been a sad year for the profession of the law. In a few short months it has been bereaved of its brightest and greatest ornaments. Clay, Webster, and Sergeant have gone to their immortal rest in quick succession. We had scarcely returned from the grave of one of them till we were summoned to the funeral of another. Like bright stars they have sunk below the horizon, and have left the land in widespread gloom. This hall that knew them so well shall know them no more. Their wisdom has no utterance now, and the voice of their eloquence shall be heard here no more forever.
"This hall itself seems as though it was sensible of its loss, and even these marble pillars seem to sympathize as they stand around us like so many majestic mourners.
"But we will have consolation in the remembrance of these illustrious men. Their _names_ will remain to us and be like a light kindled in the sky to shine upon us and to guide our course. We may hope, too, that the memory of them and their great examples will create a virtuous emulation which may raise up men worthy to be their successors in the service of their country, its constitution, and its laws.
"For this digression, and these allusions to Clay, Webster, and Sergeant, I hope the occasion may be considered as a sufficient excuse, and I will not trespass by another word, except only to move that these resolutions in relation to Judge McKinley, when they shall have been read by the clerk, may be entered on the records of this court."
JOHN M. HARNEY
John Milton Harney, the first of the Kentucky poets to win and retain a wide reputation, a man with the divine afflatus, whose whole body of song is slender but of real worth, was born near Georgetown, Delaware, March 9, 1789. He was the second son of Major Thomas Harney, of Revolutionary War fame, and the elder brother of General William S.
Harney, a hero of Cerro Gordo. When John Milton Harney was but two years old, his family emigrated to Tennessee, and later removed to Louisiana. He studied medicine and settled at Bardstown, Kentucky. In 1814 Dr. Harney married a daughter of Judge John Rowan, the early Kentucky statesman; and her death four years later was such a shock to her husband that he was compelled to abandon his practice, and seek solace in travel and new scenes. Dr. Harney spent some time in England, and on his return to America he settled at Savannah, Georgia.
He over-exerted himself at a disastrous fire in Savannah, which resulted in a violent fever and ended in breaking his health. He returned to Bardstown, Kentucky, became a convert to Roman Catholicism, and in that place he died, January 15, 1825, when but thirty-five years of age. At the age of twenty-three years, Dr. Harney wrote _Crystalina, a Fairy Tale_, in six cantos, but his extreme sensitiveness caused him to hold it in manuscript for four years, or until 1816, when it was issued anonymously at New York. This work was highly praised by Rufus W. Griswold, John Neal, and other well-known critics, but the unfavorable criticism far outweighed the favorable criticism, so the author held, and he published nothing more in book form; and he did all in his power to suppress the edition of _Crystalina_. William Davis Gallagher, poet and critic of a later time in the West, went over Dr. Harney's manuscripts and from them rescued his masterpiece, the exquisite _Echo and the Lover_. This Gallagher published in his _Western Literary Journal_ for 1837--the first form in which the public saw it. No Western poem has had a wider audience than the _Echo_. It has been parodied in Europe and America many times, and is the finest expression of Dr. Harney's genius. It is to be regretted that no comprehensive account of the poet's life and literary labors has come down to posterity. As a poet and as a man his merits were of the truest sort, but a handful of facts, a suppressed book, a lyric or so, are all that have been brought to the attention of the literary world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T.
Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); _Blades o' Bluegrass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892).
ECHO AND THE LOVER
[From _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, edited by W. T.
Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860)]
_Lover._ Echo! mysterious nymph, declare Of what you're made and what you are-- _Echo._ "Air!"
_Lover._ 'Mid airy cliffs, and places high, Sweet Echo! listening, love, you lie-- _Echo._ "You lie!"
_Lover._ You but resuscitate dead sounds-- Hark! how my voice revives, resounds!
_Echo._ "Zounds!"
_Lover._ I'll question you before I go-- Come, answer me more apropos!
_Echo._ "Poh! poh!"
_Lover._ Tell me, fair nymph, if e'er you saw So sweet a girl as Phoebe Shaw!
_Echo._ "Pshaw!"
_Lover._ Say, what will win that frisking coney Into the toils of matrimony!
_Echo._ "Money!"
_Lover._ Has Phoebe not a heavenly brow?
Is it not white as pearl--as snow?
_Echo._ "Ass, no!"
_Lover._ Her eyes! Was ever such a pair?
Are the stars brighter than they are?
_Echo._ "They are!"
_Lover._ Echo, you lie, but can't deceive me; Her eyes eclipse the stars, believe me-- _Echo._ "Leave me!"
_Lover._ But come, you saucy, pert romancer, Who is as fair as Phoebe? Answer.
_Echo._ "Ann, sir!"
THE WHIPPOWIL