Page images
PDF
EPUB

In one of his lectures,―that on "Motive Powers,"Mr. Taylor has given the story of what is probably the most widely known waif in the language a little poem which every paper in the country has printed,—and many of them a score of times-which every lover of poetry has read and re-read, which goes about under numerous names, and which has suggested more imitations, and been more frequently plagiarized, than any other bit of sentiment with which we are acquainted.

"Twenty years ago," the story runs, "on a dreary December evening, I sat in an upper room in the great metropolis, by the side of a sick girl. Not long before I had pledged to her all that a man can pledge to his heart's choice. Now in her need I lacked the means to give her proper care and comfort. From a city hundreds of miles away had come a demand for one of those commonly mechanical things known as New Year's Addresses. It was a question of poetry and bread, or no poetry and no bread. Fifty dollars was the motive power. I wrote the Address as desired, and these verses were part of it:

THE LONG AGO.

A wonderful stream is the River Time,

As it runs through the realm of Tears,
With a faultless rhythm, and a musical rhyme,
And a broader sweep, and a surge sublime
As it blends with the ocean of Years.

How the winters are drifting like flakes of snow!
And the summers like buds between ;

And the year in the sheaf-so they come and they go
On the River's breast with its ebb and its flow,

As they glide in the shadow and sheen.
There's a magical isle up the River Time,
Where the softest of airs are playing;
There's a cloudless sky and a tropical clime,
And a voice as sweet as a vesper chime,

And the Junes with the roses are staying.
And the name of the isle is the Long Ago,
And we bury our treasures there;

There are brows of beauty and bosoms of snow-
They are heaps of dust, but we loved them so!-
There are trinkets, and tresses of hair.

There are fragments of song that nobody sings,
And a part of an infant's prayer:

There's a harp unswept, and a lute without strings,
There are broken vows and pieces of rings,

And the garments that she used to wear!

There are hands that are waved when the fairy shore
By the mirage is lifted in air;

And we sometimes hear through the turbulent roar
Sweet voices we heard in the days gone before,
When the wind down the River is fair.

Oh! remembered for aye be the Blessed Isle,
All the days of our life, till night!

When the evening comes, with its beautiful smile,
And our eyelids are closing in slumber awhile,

May that "Greenwood" of soul be in sight.

We believe Benjamin F. Taylor was born at Lowville, Lewis county, N. Y., where his father, Prof. Stephen

W. Taylor, was several years engaged in teaching. He early manifested poetic genius, though how he came by such inheritance was and ever has been a puzzling question to all familiar with his parentage. His mother displayed no poetic gifts, though she was one of those true womanly women who make homelife almost a poem in itself—such an one as memory holds immortal while daisies blossom over her grave,- one whom the poet might well recall as he did in "The Child and the Star"O heart of the house, my dead mother!

[ocr errors]

Give your boy the old greeting once more,
That I never have heard from another

Since Death was let in at the door.

I can reach up my hand to the ceiling

Of the rooms once the world's greater part-
Who wonders I cannot help feeling

They have narrowed to fit to my heart!

He

His father, though possessed of strong intellect, and very liberal culture, had nothing whatever of the poetic instinct, and was, in fact, as directly the opposite of our subject in character and habit as can be imagined. was mathematically precise in all things, as rigid a stickler for discipline in thought and action as was ever known. He had literally no poetry in his soul. The most poetical features or events he would strip of their beauty, and make of them plain, precise, angular facts. On the other hand, his son clothes the homeliest hint or happening in poetic garb, wraps it in a metaphor, or decks it out with fancy, until it fairly blossoms into song.

When Benjamin F. and his brother Alfred were halfgrown lads, Prof. Taylor removed to Hamilton, Madison county, N. Y., to become Principal of the Preparatory Department of the institution now known as Madison University, of which institution he ultimately became President, and in which his sons were mainly educated. As a scholar Benjamin F. was not remarkable. His mental make-up was not that of the close, plodding student. He was discursive, and liked rambling off into new paths, as was shown by his preparing a little volume, while in college, entitled "The Attractions of Language,' his first venture in authorship. It was brought out in Hamilton, and much of it was written under pressure of the printer, the author's characteristic of procrastination in literary work cropping out at the very beginning.

His earliest poetical effort of any moment was, if we mistake not, a long poem written for delivery before some society, in which occurred this original and fanciful explanation of the Northern Lights:

To claim the Arctic came the sun,
With banners of the burning zone.
Unrolled upon their airy spars,
They froze beneath the light of stars;
And there they float, those streamers old,

Those Northern Lights, forever cold!

After leaving college Mr. Taylor taught school awhile, in various places in Central New York; married, at length; tried literature in New York, but with poor

success; and finally went to Chicago and became connected with The Evening Journal, of that city, as literary editor and contributor. His short, suggestive, often quaint and pithy articles in that paper soon attracted attention, and some of them were widely copied by the Press. They were presently collected in a modest volume entitled "January and June," which has more genuine poetry of thought in its two hundred and odd pages than can be found anywhere else in the same space, to our knowledge. In that volume appears what is probably the best thing Mr. Taylor ever wrote a poem only less generally known and admired than the waif before spoken of, and having more artistic merit than any other from Mr. T.'s pen. It closes a little raphsody on "Bugs and Beauties," in which the real theme is Nature's coloring. Speaking of what glory-tints the evening shows, in the midst of description our writer glides away into memory:

"On such a night, in such a June, who has not sat, side by side, with somebody for all the world like 'Jenny June'? May be it was years ago; but it was some time. May be you had quite forgotten it; but you will be the better for remembering. May be she has 'gone on before,' where it is June all the year long, and never January at all; but God forbid! There it was, and then it was, and thus it was:

THE BEAUTIFUL RIVER.

Like a foundling in slumber the Summer-day lay,
On the crimsoning threshold of Even,

« PreviousContinue »