But tears? And she began to shed, Thereat, the tears that comforted.
(No other beautiful woman breathed, No rival among men had he, The seraph's sword of fire was sheathed, The golden fruit hung on the tree.
Her lord was lord of all the earth, Wherein no child had wailed its birth),
Tears to a bride? Yea, therefore tears.
In Eden? Yea, and tears therefore.
Ah, bride in Eden, there were fears In the first blush your young cheek wore, Lest that first kiss had been too sweet, Lest Eden withered from your feet!
Mother of women! Did you see How brief your beauty, and how brief, Therefore, the love of it must be, In that first garden, that first grief?
Did those first drops of sorrow fall To move God's pity for us all?
Oh, sobbing mourner by the dead-- One watcher at the grave grass-grown!
Oh, sleepless for some darling head Cold-pillowed on the prison-stone, Or wet with drowning seas! He knew, Who gave the gift of tears to you!
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Copyright, 1901, by McClure, Phillips and Company.
[22] Copyright, 1906, by John James Piatt.
BOYD WINCHESTER
Boyd Winchester, author of a charming book on Switzerland, was born in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, September 23, 1836. He came to Kentucky when a youth and entered Centre College, Danville, where he studied for three years. He subsequently spent two years at the University of Virginia. Mr. Winchester was graduated from the Law School of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1858, and that city has been his home ever since. He rose rapidly in his profession; and he later served a single term in the Kentucky legislature, and two terms in the lower House of Congress. President Cleveland appointed Mr. Winchester United States Minister to Switzerland, in 1885, and the next four years he resided at Berne. While in Switzerland Mr. Winchester was an ardent student of the country's history and a keen observer of its aspects and institutions. On his return to the United States he wrote his well-known book, _The Swiss Republic_ (Philadelphia, 1891). A fire his publishers, the Lippincotts, suffered shortly after his volume was issued, destroyed the unsold copies, and the small first edition was soon exhausted. The work has thus become exceedingly scarce.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _National Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1906, v. xiii); _General Catalogue of Centre College_.
LAKE GENEVA[23]
[From _The Swiss Republic_ (Philadelphia, 1891)]
The Lake of Geneva is the largest of Western Europe, being fifty-seven miles long, and its greatest width nine miles; it has its storms, its waves, and its surge; now placid as a mirror, now furious as the Atlantic; at times a deep-blue sea curling before the gentle waves, then a turbid ocean dark with the mud and sand from its lowest depths; the peasants on its banks still laugh at the idea of there being sufficient cordage in the world to reach the bottom of the _Genfer-See_. It is eleven hundred and fifty-four feet above the sea, and having the same depth, its bottom coincides with the sea-level; the water is of such exceeding purity that when analyzed only 0.157 in 1000 contain foreign elements. The lake lies nearly in the form of a crescent stretching from the southwest towards the northeast.
Mountains rise on every side, groups of the Alps of Savoy, Valais, and Jura. The northern or the Swiss shore is chiefly what is known as a _cote_, or a declivity that admits of cultivation, with spots of verdant pasture scattered at its feet and sometimes on its breast, with a cheery range of garden, chalet, wood, and spire; villas, hamlets, and villages seem to touch each other down by the banks, and to form but one town, whilst higher up, they peep out from among the vineyards or nestle under the shade of walnut-trees. At the foot of the lake is the white city of Geneva, of which Bancroft wrote, "Had their cause been lost, Alexander Hamilton would have retired with his bride to Geneva, where nature and society were in their greatest perfection." The city is divided into two parts by the Rhone as it glides out of the basin of the lake on its course towards the Mediterranean. The Arve pours its turbid stream into the Rhone soon after that river issues from the lake. The contrast between the two rivers is very striking, the one being as pure and limpid as the other is foul and muddy. The Rhone seems to scorn the alliance and keeps as long as possible unmingled with his dirty spouse; two miles below the place of their junction a difference and opposition between this ill-assorted couple is still observable; these, however, gradually abate by long habit, till at last, yielding to necessity, and to the unrelenting law which joined them together, they mix imperfect union and flow in a common stream to the end of their course. At the head of the lake begins the valley of the Rhone, where George Eliot said, "that the very sunshine seemed dreary mid the desolation of ruin and of waste in this long, marshy, squalid valley; and yet, on either side of the weary valley are noble ranges of granite mountains, and hill resorts of charm and health...." Standing at almost any point on the Lake of Geneva, to the one side towers Dent-du-Midi, calm, proud, and dazzling, like a queen of brightness; on the other side is seen the Jura through her misty shroud extending in mellow lines, and a cloudless sky vying in depths of color with the azure waters. So graceful the outlines, so varied the details, so imposing the framework in which this lake is set, well might Voltaire exclaim, "Mon lac est le premier," (my lake is the first). For richness combined with grandeur, for softness around and impressiveness above, for a correspondence of contours on which the eye reposes with unwearied admiration, from the smiling aspect of fertility and cultivation at its lower extremity to the sublimity of a savage nature at its upper, no lake is superior to that of Geneva. Numberless almost are the distinguished men and women who have lived, labored, and died upon the shores of this fair lake; every spot has a tale to tell of genius, or records some history. In the calm retirement of Lausanne, Gibbon contemplated the decay of empires; Rousseau and Byron found inspiration on these shores; there is
"Clarens, sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep love!
Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought; Thy trees take root in love."
Here is Chillon, with its great white wall sinking into the deep calm of the water, while its very stones echo memorable events, from the era of barbarism in 830, when Count Wala, who had held command of Charlemagne's forces, was incarcerated within the tower of this desolate rock during the reign of Louis le Debonnaire, to the imprisonment of the Salvation Army captain.
"Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls; A thousand feet in depth below, Its massy waters meet and flow; Below the surface of the lake The dark vault lies"
where Bonnivard, the prior of St. Victor and the great asserter of the independence of Geneva, was found when the castle was wrested from the Duke of Savoy by the Bernese.
FOOTNOTE:
[23] Copyright, 1891, by J. B. Lippincott Company.
THOMAS M. GREEN
Thomas Marshall Green, journalist and historian, was born near Danville, Kentucky, November 23, 1836, the son of Judge John Green, an early Kentucky jurist of repute, who died when his son was but two years old. Green was graduated from Centre College, Danville, in what is now known as the famous class of '55, which included several men afterwards distinguished. In 1856 Green joined the staff of the _Frankfort Commonwealth_, then a political journal of wide influence; and in the following year he became editor of that paper. He left the _Commonwealth_ in 1860, to become editor of the _Maysville Eagle_, of which he made a pronounced success, its screams smacking not at all of the dignified days of its first editors, the Collinses, father and son. His _Historic Families of Kentucky_ (Cincinnati, 1889), gave him a place among Kentucky historians, but the late Colonel John Mason Brown, of Louisville, gave to Green his greatest opportunity when he published his _The Political Beginnings of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1889). This work of Colonel Brown's was, in effect, an avowed vindication of the reputation of his grandfather, John Brown, first United States Senator from Kentucky, who, in the stormy days in which his lot had been cast, had been violently attacked for his alleged connection with the Spanish Conspiracy of Aaron Burr, which was charged in a controversy running through many years of violent disputation, to have been an attempt in connection with General James Wilkinson, Judges Sebastian, Wallace, and Innes of the Kentucky Court of Appeals and others to detach Kentucky from her allegiance to the United States, and annex her territory to the Spanish dominions of the South and South-west, through which the much-desired free navigation of the Mississippi would be assured. Colonel Brown was a brilliant man of unusual scholarly attainments and deeply read in American history.
These qualities with his large legal training enabled him to present a strong case in the vindication of his grandfather's reputation. His arguments, theories, and proofs were illuminating, able, and to many minds most convincing, while they fell with small effect upon Green and many others who held the opposite view. For this reason Green wrote and published _The Spanish Conspiracy_ (Cincinnati 1891), a wonderfully well informed and clever work, and the one upon which he takes his place among Western historians. Students who would be fully informed as to the many phases--the charges and matter relied upon for defense, pro and con, in this bitter controversy which marshalled Kentucky into two hostile camps, whose alignments were more or less maintained through many strenuous years--must study these two books.
They present the last word on either side. Colonel Brown's untimely death, which occurred in 1890, some months before the appearance of Green's book, probably lost Kentucky a reply to the Maysville historian that would have added to the flood of light thrown on this early and vital crisis. _The Spanish Conspiracy_ was supplemented and supported in its conclusions by Mr. Anderson C. Quisenberry's _The Life and Times of Hon. Humphrey Marshall_ (Winchester, Kentucky, 1892). Thomas M. Green died at Danville, Kentucky, April 7, 1904.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Biographical Encyclopaedia of Kentucky_ (Cincinnati, 1878); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v, xv).
THE CONSPIRATORS[24]
[From _The Spanish Conspiracy_ (Cincinnati, 1891)]
The grief of the reader in learning from the _Political Beginnings_, that Humphrey Marshall was "violent, irreligious and profane," will be mollified by the assurance given in the same work that Harry Innes "was a sincerely religious man." It might with equal truth have been stated that Caleb Wallace, who had abandoned the Presbyterian pulpit to go into politics, kept up his church relations, and practiced his devotions with the utmost regularity. Sebastian also, who had cast off the gown of the Episcopal ministry in his pursuit of the "flesh pots of Egypt," continued, it is believed, the exercise of all religious observations, and, in the depth of his piety, deemed a treasonable overture entirely too good to be communicated to an infidel. While John Brown, who had absorbed faith as he sat under the very droppings of the sanctuary, it will be cheerfully conceded was the most devout of the four. On the other hand, John Wood, one of the editors of the _Western World_, whom they afterwards bought, was a reprobate; and young Joseph M. Street, whom they could neither bribe nor intimidate, and the attempt to assassinate whom proved a failure, was a sinner. It is distressing to think that, like Gavin Hamilton, the latter "drank, and swore, and played at cards." It may be that the wickedness of the editors of the _Western World_, and the contemplation of their own saintliness, justified in the eyes of the four Christian jurists and statesmen the several little stratagems they devised, and paid Littell for introducing into his "Narrative," in order to obtain the advantage of the wicked editors in the argument. The contrast of their characters made innocent those little mutilations by Innes of his own letter to Randolph! The same process of reasoning made laudable John Brown's suppression of his Muter letter, his assertion that it was identical with the "sliding letter," and his claim that the acceptance of Gardoqui's proposition would have been consistent with the alleged purpose to make some future application for the admission of Kentucky into the new Union! While the suppression of the resolution of Wallace and Wilkinson in the July convention, and the declaration that such a _motion never was made_, in order to prove the unhappy editors to be liars, became as praiseworthy as the spoiling of the Egyptians by the Israelites! The scene of those four distinguished gentlemen seated around a table, with a prayer-book in the center, planning the screen for themselves and the discomfiture of the editors, would be a subject worthy of the brush of a Hogarth.
FOOTNOTE:
[24] Copyright, 1891, by Robert Clarke Company.
FORCEYTHE WILLSON
Forceythe Willson, "the William Blake of Western letters," was born at Little Genesee, New York, April 10, 1837, the elder brother of the latest Republican governor of Kentucky, Augustus E. Willson. When Forceythe was nine years old, his family packed their household goods upon an "ark," or Kentucky flatboat, at Pittsburgh, and drifted down the Ohio river, landing at Maysville, Kentucky, where they resided for a year, and in which town the future governor of Kentucky was born. In 1847 the Willsons removed to Covington, Kentucky, and there Forceythe's education was begun. The family lived at Covington for six years, at the end of which time Forceythe entered Harvard University, but an attack of tuberculosis compelled him to leave without his degree. He returned to the West, making his home at New Albany, Indiana, a little town just across the Ohio river from Louisville. A year later Willson joined the editorial staff of the _Louisville Journal_, and together he and Prentice courted the muse and defended the cause of the Union. Willson's masterpiece, _The Old Sergeant_, was the "carrier's address" for January 1, 1863, printed anonymously on the front page of the _Journal_. The author's name was withheld until Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced it the best ballad the war had produced, when Willson was heralded as its author. _The Old Sergeant_ recites an almost literally true story, and it is wonderfully well done. In the fall of 1863 Willson was married to the New Albany poet, Elizabeth C. Smith, and they removed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the future executive of the Commonwealth of Kentucky was a student in Harvard University. The Willsons purchased a home near Lowell's, and they were soon on friendly terms with all of the famous New England writers. In 1866 _The Old Sergeant and Other Poems_ appeared at Boston, but it did not make an appeal to the general public. Forceythe Willson died at Alfred Centre, New York, February 2, 1867, but his body was brought back to Indiana, and buried on the banks of the Whitwater river. Willson believed it quite possible for the living to hold converse with the dead, and this, with other strange beliefs, entered largely into his poetry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. His authoritative biographer, Mr. John James Piatt, the Ohio poet, has written illuminatingly of this rare fellow, with his "almond-shaped eyes," as Dr. Holmes called them, and his Oriental look and manner, in _The Atlantic Monthly_ (March, 1875); _Lexington Leader_ (September 13, 1908). His brother, Hon.
Augustus E. Willson, will shortly utter the final word concerning him and his work.
THE OLD SERGEANT
[From _The Old Sergeant and Other Poems_ (Boston, 1867)]
The Carrier cannot sing to-day the ballads With which he used to go, Rhyming the glad rounds of the happy New Years That are now beneath the snow:
For the same awful and portentous Shadow That overcast the earth, And smote the land last year with desolation, Still darkens every hearth.
And the carrier hears Beethoven's mighty death-march Come up from every mart; And he hears and feels it breathing in his bosom, And beating in his heart.
And to-day, a scarred and weather-beaten veteran, Again he comes along, To tell the story of the Old Year's struggles In another New Year's song.
And the song is his, but not so with the story; For the story, you must know, Was told in prose to Assistant-Surgeon Austin, By a soldier of Shiloh;