Poems, 1854-1906

Front matter

Book . v-4

Taken in Water town ^ Mass., October, 1874

POEMS

Preface

THE AUTHOR TO HER FRIENDS.

Because you who have known me personaUy have given me true affection, and you who, not having met me, have yet proven yourselves kind and dear, I am minded to preface tliis presumably final collection of my metrical writings (covering a period of fifty-two years), with a few notes which may, in your estimation, add to its value. Also, I have been so often solicited to give some account of myself for others to print, that I can scarcely avoid making use of this last opportunity for showing by what inheritances and through what impulses I was led to choose the poet's vocation. Whatever is autobiographical herein, closes with my nineteenth year. After that time the poems themselves continue the story, since, whatever their demerits, sincerity is nowhere lacking; and albeit my "singing robe" may not be a fabric to wonder at, I may at least claim that the spinning and weaving thereof were most carefully done.

Upon an elevated, horizontal grave-slab in

VI INTRODUCTION.

Watertown, Mass., dated in Puritan times, you may read: "He Was a Painful Preacher." If any shall say of me two hundred years hence: "She Was a Painful Poet," what more could be desired?

Henry Jones, born on Greylock Mountain (then Saddle Back), Mass., March, 1798, of early Welsh-Puritan, English and Scotch-Irish ancestry, and Mary Alma Mott, born in Oriskany, N. Y., February, 1813, of Huguenot, English and (remotely) "North River Dutch" descent, were united m marriage, July, 1828. They welcomed me, their fourth child, in East Bloomfield, Ontario County, N. Y., October 19th, 1835. My mother and her eight children then living welcomed the twelfth m Black Rock (Buffalo, N. Y.) soon after my father's death, m the spring of 1854. Six of these remain.

My great-grandfather, Isaac Jones, who inherited the upland farm taken up by the Jones family about 1670, left home to serve two years in the Revolutionary Army. Among his seven mature sons (summed up by him as "forty-two feet of boys") was one Seth, who — first being ordained as a Baptist minister — puzzled his lone way, by much Biblical reading, into Universalism — then looked upon by most with feelings akin to horror. He drew after him several brothers and sixty of his one hundred and eighty church members — "a third part of the stars of heaven," my grandfather, Isaac, used to say. And, indeed, his biographer, the loved Stephen R. Smith, states that "so great was his fervor

INTRODUCTION. Vll

and natural eloquence, Calvinists flocked to hear him, while in sermons of almost interminable length, but never wearisome, he won many over to the doctrine of 'Free Grace.' "

Especially did his intense belief in the eflicacy of the "Prayer of Faith" produce a deep impression— partly due to this unquestioned fact : During a distressing drouth (J. think near Sackett's Harbor, N. Y.) an assemblage of farmers in open field expressed in his presence utter hopelessness with regard to rain, saying that a single day more would ruin every crop. "If you would pray for rain with Faith it would come," he said. "But we have no faith ! Will not you exercise it for us?" Whereupon he knelt down upon a stump and prayed mightily for three hours, while (it was related) copious showers fell from the eyes of his hearers. When he descended the first great drops of a "glorious rain" were dashing down. At eighty-three he presided over a Universalist convention.

I am proud to record that a stranger, who had been his parishioner in youth, once addressed me because of a marked facial resemblance to "Elder Jones." Nor was the likeness merely facial. In my eighth year, while, one morning, scurrying through the Lord's Prayer, an unvoiced message arrested me as a bolt. "Child ! You are not praying! You are insulting God!" and I slunk away wholly ashamed. "Do you pray?" asked our Sunday school superintendent of each deeply pious child soon after ; but when my turn came I alone answered "No!" I think

Vlll INTRODUCTION.

the look in my mother's eyes meant approval. Both she and my father abhorred a lie.

Now something had been lost across the way in a vacant house, or its neglected garden, and my eagle-eyed mother, with four others, had made long and fruitless search. She stopped her spinning one day and her song (''The Bovver of Prayer") to offer me a reward if I would find it. Such an easy thing to do! and there werq beads in prospect! As I crossed the road the impossibility of succeeding first occurred. Then every thought was merged in one intense desire to pray. Nozv I could ask! — which I had never done in my Hfe. I fell on my knees among the sunflowers, and seemed to myself going up, up. almost to the clouds, for my answer. It came: "Yes ! Child ! You shall have the key." It was in my hand within five minutes. That same key has since unlocked for me many heavy doors.

Several of my father's immediate family, including himself, were not only devout Methodists, but were truly subject to experiences such as would now be called ''Psychic." Yet they were not anemiacs ! I am inclined to refer certain tendencies of my own in that direction to my father's mother, born Hannah Henry. Listening in 1856 to a rather noted blind revivalist (author of quaint religious books — "Wedlock and Padlock" for instance), who was liable to be swept away in veritable trances, a young man who was uncommonly apt in the study of human nature, insisted that, despite my non-Methodism, "Blind Henry" and I were "temperamental coun-

INTRODUCTION. IX

terparts." The preacher proved to be my father's first cousin. Now I have not a scrap of writicn authority to prove that Patrick Henry belonged to a branch of our family, but the great uncles said it. I reverence them.

My maternal grandmother, Naomi Daggett (Mott), of Rome, N. Y., or thereabouts, was the daughter of one who, acting as drum major in General Wolfe's army, displayed such fortitude under hardships and so distinguished himself by bravery at the Battle of Quebec, that his superior officer presented him with his own sword, saying: "You have been a better and a braver soldier than I." Alas and alas! His children had that same sword "melted, beaten, hammered or rolled" into — souvenir spoons! Another of Naomi Daggett's ancestors was one of those Mayhews driven out from among the Puritans for liberality of religious teachings.

Louis Mott and his son Josef (or it may have been Josef and his son Louis), being French Huguenots, fled to America and settled in Mount Pleasant, Hunterdon County, N. J. Dropping an aristocratic prefix they speedily foregathered with the Quakers. Ebenezer. a grandson of the elder Mott, greatly enhanced his wide influence in the society by marrying Sarah Collins, an English Quaker lady, who had great celebrity both at home and here as a "preacher" of singular sweetness and power, Both were memorialized, old Quakers have said, in "The Lives of the Saints." Each of their several sons was given, on leaving home, sixteen Jos and thirty-

X INTRODUCTION.

two half Jos — a Jo being a gold piece (Spanish- Mexican I think), then rated as worth sixteen and one-half dollars, when a dollar was of much greater value than now. A spinster daughter inherited the Homestead property — willed to "that one who should remain a Quaker." So far as I know, this was the high water mark of financial prosperity among all my progenitors!

Their son, my grandfather, John Mott, supposed himself to be still a "Friend" (although he had lost his "birth-right" by marrying out of the society) until this happened: He was one bitterly cold Sunday forced to defend his family (a wife and three children, one but a day old) from six marauding Hessian soldiers. They broke down the barricaded door with axes, but were without firearms, as was the case with my grandfather (unless, indeed, tongs and poker may be so classed). As a result three took to their heels and the remaining three were cast out over the door sill, dead. One of the two little girls hidden in the cellar never forgot the tumult overhead — she living to be not much under a hundred.

The following morning John Mott went to Valley Forge and received from Washington's "own hand" a lieutenant's commission. With no more delay than was necessary for the burial of wife and babe, he recruited and equipped a company at his own expense, and thereafter spent all his possessions in the service of his country, throughout five years and eight months, till conclusion of peace. Be it noted that his

INTRODUCTION. XI

^'saintly" mother, after having been taken by him through camp, humbly confessed that the ''carnal heart took pride and rejoiced in the protection of a son who was a tall and brave soldier." That son would never apply for a pension, although forced to support his third family (,a wife and eight children, of whom my mother was the youngest) by learning and practising the tailor's trade— nor yet in a beggarly way, for he had apprentices. Hale and unbowed at seventy-seven, he died as did Washington, of quinsy and mismanagement. Shortly before his death his sons and others saw him crossing the Mohawk River on the string pieces of a very long bridge m process of building, but none dared follow.

To digress: his second wife, Mrs. Mann, brought him a step-son William, who became an eminent educator of Pennsylvania, a president of her colleges for thirty years. In a letter to my mother, written in 1855, when he was very old, he gave the credit of his great success wholly to my grandfather, who had wisely advised and generously assisted him ; and he added that, mindful of what had been done for himself, he had, beside his own family, "brought up three boys who had become Governors of their respective States." Further to digress : the fact is beyond question that had it not been for his eminent son, William B. Mann, of Philadelphia, who controlled the Pennsylvania delegation to the Republican convention of i860, William H. Seward would have been nominated for the

:;it INTRODUCTION.

Presidency instead of Abraham Lincoln. "We know not all the paths."

And yet more concerning John Mott. The country, after the war, was overrun with desperate men; and my grandfather, whose specialty had been ''secret service," was chosen county sheriff, to hold them in restraint. It came about that a large family — even to a babe in the cradle — was murdered — plunder being the object — during his absence from home. Knowing nothing of this, he dreamed that he entered mto an untraversed forest in his neighborhood, noting his way carefully, and finally went down mto a tangled dell where were two villainous looking men lying under cover. A third, young and prepossessing, sat wringing his hands. "Why are you doing that?" asked the dreamer, and was ansvv'ered: "There is blood upon my hands. It is the blood of a lamb," Upon his return homa the next afternoon he organized a search party, caused the glen to be surrounded and arrested the three, who in all particulars answered to those of whom he had dreamed — save that the younger one instantly rose and made full confession for all. As he had never before been engaged in villainy, and had been compelled by the others to drink to the point of frenzy, my grandfather labored hard to get his sentence commuted, although it was he who had, in distraction, killed the babe. Grieved that he must die with the rest, the sheriff resigned his office and would never track another criminal.

I relate this incident because it permits me to

INTRODUCTION. Xlll

say that the development of what may be called capacity for spiritual illummation seems to me a not unlikely result of those inner communmgS characteristic of Quaker worship. I suppose my mother to have drawn from this source a certain power of pre-vision in dreams, sometimes foreshowing even national events; as m 1832, I think, when she saw the whole land covered with tents, upon the largest of which she read: "In 186— there was war for liberty"— the last figure seeming to be blurred as if made up of several. Nor was I myself (since I am to be spoken of) leftv absolutely without inheritance of such a gift. As witness: "The Prophecy of the Dead,* written when our apprehensions had been quieted by the declaration of Seward that the Rebellion would be over within ninety days. Leaving mother at 10:30 one morning, and merrily telling her that I had promised to write a love ballad, I crossed to a large school-house and shut myself in. Eight lines were written when I dropped the pencil. Then all the billows rolled over me , . . I wrung my hands, saying: 'T cannot write it!" but the law of utterance was inexorable. At noon I returned and read the poem to my mother. She heard it with a pale face, and said solemnly; "Amanda, you have been inspired!" I answered: "Mother, I have been inspired." In July, 1862, I, with others, expected to hear any day of the fall of Richmond. Again prophetic knowledge and utterance came — verified nearly three years later. Love of country characterized our parents equally. Our father read aloud to us the history

XIV INTRODUCTION.

of the long struggle with as much evidence of emotion as he exhibited at ''Family Prayers," or in his fervid church meetings. Our mother sang and recited to us innumerable revolutionary ballads learned, before her tenth year, of her father and half-brother, John, who had served through the War of 1812. The latter had enjoyed nothing more than slipping over into Canada, where he was well known and certain to be called on for entertainment, and singing those very songs — the fun lying in the certainty of arrest for "contempt of the King." Landed in jail, for form's sake probably, he made the ballads ring again till he was let out.

Our parents biased us politically, one as much as the other, though I think mother most thoroughly instructed us. At nine I hurrahed by the roadside, in a faint, scary way, for Henry Clay, while the boys were singing: "Van! Van! Is a Used Up Man!"

Also I ardently believed in a protective tariff — having understood that "free trade" had virtually annihilated woolen manufacture, my father being master of that art. And when a long Whig procession trailed by before election, having a great band wagon filled with young ladies, all in white, to represent States (I forget how many), I laughed at the one lady in mourning following after with a flag: "Please let me in!" What, let Texas in to make another slave State? Not I. For sentiment, I delighted in hearing my mother sing Whittier's "Yankee Girl."

When in later years my mother, as a widow,

INTRODUCTION. XV

was dependent upon our oldest sister (see 'The Life Beautiful") and her sons, for the support of herself and the younger ones, two of the three boys enlisted with her consent — one of whom did not return. My sister never complained of her added burdens. Patriotism was, in itself, a religion with us.

I had not — none of us had — our mother's phenomenal memory ; but this is my earliest recollection: I stood in green grass half as high as myself, bareheaded, but clutching a bonnet in my left hand. Before me, a few rods away, was a clear creek, across which rose a green hill. A red-faced and red-haired boy was pinching my right arm. I was not crying (and that was characteristic) but to avoid seeing his mocking face I looked past him to a brown two-story house, where I wanted to go, and all about me, so fixing the landscape indelibly upon my brain. I saw and recognized the place just fourteen years later, on my way to a country school I was to teach — ignorant of the fact that for a single summer that house had been my home — I then being less than two years old. I grieve to say that the boy was in "State prison" at twenty-five. My elder brother had a still more remarkable memory of an event and a conversation which transpired when he was but eighteen months old.

My parents imagined that a child of three, exceptionally vigorous, who could name all the letters of the alphabet after a single telling, was old enough to go to school. And, indeed, an older sister was in the highest reading class at

XVi INTRODUCTION.

five. After snowfall they kept me out till the time of mud. The first abiding affection I had Outside of home was for a man who saw me astray in the middle of the road on my way to school, and, wading through, pulled me out of my shoes and carried them and me to the schoolroom door. As I never asked for help, the older ones had forgotten me. I was quite seven before I was promoted from the New Testament to the ''English Reader," practically a high school reading book, made up of master classics.

A.t three we were visited by my grandmother Mott, whose beautiful v;hite face filled me with wonder. A year or two later I strayed from home, through a meadow where tall grass almost hindered movement, and came upon a Turk's cap lily. Perhaps I shall be as much amazed Vshen I first open my eyes upon the flowery wonders of Paradise, but I almost doubt it. I worshipped the flower, until at last a conviction fastened itself upon my mind that here was something God had '"just made !"

I v/as not quite six when imagination sprang into existence — the manner of which is related in "Coming Home.' Now in those days we country people were mainly dependent upon the v;eekly church newspaper and the "District School Library" for reading, outside of the Pible. Sunday school libraries hardly counted if Charlotte Elizabeth's pious books had achieved the honor of the Pope's malediction. (I used to wonder why they seemed so tame.) But hooks v/ere more necessary than daily bread to

INtRODUCTION. Xvil

our parents. They taught the older ones, including myself, to consider the religio-astronomical works of Thomas L. Dick, D.D., L.L.D., with Milton, Pollock, Baxter and Bunyan, as almost Biblical. My father was impressed with the idea that the Blest (his uncle, Seth, had shaken his faith in there being any perpetually unblest) would roam from star' to star to learn of God, and perhaps find at last that ''Central Sun," from which all glory and all law emanates. I liked my father's ideas better than rny mother's, for each time that she convinced him_ of a literal resurrection of the body, from Scripture texts, something unconvinced liim by another sunrise. I too remained as unbelieving.

But we had lighter reading: Frederica Breme^i-. Jane Austin, Maria Edgworth, Eliza Cook, and. best of all, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, whose passion flowers of poesy are unwithering.

Oh, but we had much more than this ! I do not know how my mother had made such vast reapings in English literature. She left school at ten, when her father died, and was much employed in spinning and the like until her marriage, five and a half vears later. But large portions of Dryden, Pope, Campbell, Goldsmith, Scott^ and many other poets were seemingly as familiar to her as her own old spelling book, v/hose chapter on orthography I heard her repeat in middle age. History, biography, romance all had been gathered up as sheaves. She sprang surprises upon me even to the last of my stay with her — spiritual hymns, quaint '*love-and-

XVllI IXTRODUCTIOX.

murder" songs, ghostly old ballads. Not less, her own thoughts had swift and brilhant utterance and her conversational powers were unusual.

During my ninth year came the great Millerite excitement, and nearly all members of the Methodist Church we attended were swept away. 'The tenth day of the seventh month" was to be the great day of resurrection. With what pride I listened to my mother on that wild, last Sunday, when she arose in the midst of ''Hallelujahs" and silenced them with a plain exposition of Scripture, gathering up text after text to prove the delusive nature of their expectations! Men and women locked at each other in dismay, while in a clear, controlled voice she summed up her argument; and in the vestibule one came to her sobbing: "Sister Jones, but for you I should have gone over the bay !"

Such poems as came in my way between six and nine retain their hold upon my memory yet. "Barbara Lewthwaite" gave me the heartache, and I never read this stanza of Whittier's without a tremor:

"The stormy March has come at last,

With wind and cloud and changing skies ; I hear the rushing of the blast That through the snowy valley flies."

But I loved best of all that wonderful story of Lady Mary Campbell's dream, as related in verse by the family chaplain, beginning, "The moon had climbed the highest hill." I longed

INTRODUCTION. xix

to believe it true, as I have since learned that it was. No ghost could have scared me — I loved the very thought of them !

I ought to have learned the meaning of grief when eight years old, through the death of little Mary (see *'A Flower of Paradise"), but instead I lost myself in contemplation of some imagined glory hiding her from sight. In lower moods I planned how I would tell, when grown up, about her beauty and sweetness, and how. when exactly eight months old, she had with perfect distinctness repeated a sentence of thirteen small words, shouted out by brother Bennie ; and how God had wanted her — I was proud because He had wanted her! Three years later I sobbed violently over the coffin of a schoolrnate, but it was not grief so much as a realization of her wonderful loveliness.

At thirteen Sorrow took hold of me with might. A brother but two years my senior died in my presence in school, of heart disease. The teacher, being frightened and incompetent, left me to take entire charge of removal, summoning physician and parents, and there could be no possibility of tears, grief was so vast. This was the "pure young lad" of the poem "Father." He was the most wonderful boy I ever knew. Endowed with the splendid intellect of our mother as none of the others could claim to be, it had been sublimated by the refining fire of his malady into spirituality, so that I might well name him in another poem, "The Sun-Bright Boy." After this I was dull and morbid, finding little comfort

XX INTRODUCTION.

save in study and the singing oi mournful hymns. It was, in a sense, well for me that at just fifteen I began teaching *'all by my lone" in the backwoods, and rather strenuously, since boys of eighteen were among my pupils. Two years of alternate teaching and high school attendance resulted in a failure of health, from which I never fully rallied.

"The Dead Pine" signalizes a partial emergence from a six years period of physical depression and distress which had culminated in such an excessive weakness of the lungs that the ablest of physicians (Dr. Hubbard Foster of Clifton Springs Water Cure — who, with Dr. Cordelia Green, undoubtedly saved my life) prohibited the writing of verse for all time. That poem concludes the volume entitled "Ulah" — 300 pages, copied, compiled and partly written a year later.

"Lost and Saved" marks the opening of a new era of thought and purpose, accompanied always by such severe mental labor as uncertain wellbeing would permit. I owe my increased length of days to the care and tenderness of many friends.

At this point I turn aside to say that but for Davis W. Clark, D. D., editor of The Ladies' Repository, and afterward a Bishop of the Methodist Church, I doubt if the gates of that sacred enclosure, where poets learn to sing, would ever have been opened for me; and, indeed, the little quarterly payments for verses contributed to that magazine during six years

INTRODUCTION. XXl

comprised nearly all my earnings. A merry letter which I wrote to him, in 1853, denouncing a contributor for advising young poets to "stop," appeared in the Editor's Table as having "bubbled up into our face." Now my father firmly believed that I was to be a poet, and urged me to send something for publication, himself selecting the verses. During the three following months I heard him several times say in an undertone : I wonder whether Dr. Clark \vill publish "The Transplanted Flower." While I was standing by his bed — he slumbering toward Death — the magazine, containing the sorry little piece so named, was handed me; and to his unconscious soul I said: "Father, I will be a pcet if only for your sake."

Now why should I add more.^

A. T. J.