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Fletcher Dole of Norridgewock, whom the weight of a full century could not keep from writing graceful verses; Frank A. Munsey, who began here in his native state the publishing career that has revolutionized the magazine world; Edward P. Mitchell of the New York Sun, probably the most distinguished of the many brilliant men whom Maine has contributed to metropolitan journalism; Harry L. Koopman, a librarian who has adorned his own shelves and those of others with scholarly works in both prose and verse; James Phinney Baxter, who has found time in a success- ful business career to write many poems and much historical matter of great worth, and who, when well past eighty, has added an exhaustive work to the literature of the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy; Henry S. Burrage, journalist and theologian, but pre-eminently a Maine historian ; De Alva S. Alexander, political historian of New York, which he long represented in Congress; Everett S. Stackpole, a religious writer, geneal- ogist and local historian, with a monumental historical work on New Hamp- shire recently to his credit; Louis Clinton Hatch, scholarly historian of the Revolutionary Army, of the pension system and of our own state; Professor Henry Johnson, who crowned forty years of fruitful work as teacher and poet with the masterly translation of Dante that won him the grateful recognition of universities and learned societies of two con- tinents.
And the women writers of Maine! Thirty years ago George Ban- croft Griffith compiled a book of 850 pages, "The Poets of Maine.". It was on lines similar to those followed in "The Bowdoin Poets", published in 1840, and the "Native Poets of Maine", published in 1854. Griffith found nearly 450 Maine writers worthy of places in his compilation-though it will readily be admitted that only by a very liberal and charitable con- struction can many of them be enrolled as poets-and of that number 167 were women. A present day compilation, if made equally comprehensive, would probably mean half a dozen volumes as large as Griffith's.
The women writers of Maine-not to mention again those already referred to-include many authors widely known and loved-Harriet Prescott Spofford, with more than a score of novels and books of verse to her credit, who declines at 83 to lay aside the pen she has wielded so happily ; Sarah Orne Jewett, whose charming stories of The Country of the Pointed Firs won her the degree of Doctor of Letters from Bowdoin in 1901, the first woman to receive a degree from that college; Martha Baker Dunn, poet and essayist whom the country came to know better through the generous praise that President Roosevelt gave one of her articles in the Atlantic Monthly; Emma Huntington Nason, poet and historian of old Hallowell, the mother of Professor Arthur Huntington Nason of New York University-himself the author of several very scholarly works;
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Caroline Dana Howe, of whose books of poems and 30 hymns nothing is better known than her song "Leaf by Leaf the Roses Fall"; Elizabeth Akers Allen, writer of much exquisite verse but of nothing more certain to endure than her
"Backward, turn backward, O Time in your flight, Make me a child again just for tonight!"
Ella Maude Smith Moore, of Thomaston, whose poem beginning
" 'Rock of Ages, cleft for me' Thoughtlessly the maiden sung, Fell the words unconsciously From her girlish, gleeful tongue"
has been going the rounds for more than forty years, and carries in its lines the same undying appeal that vibrates through Mrs. Allen's "Rock Me to Sleep;" Clara Marcelle Greene, many of whose poems have dra- matic strength and fire; Frances Laughton Mace, a prolific writer of grace- ful poems among which "Only Waiting" is perhaps the most familiar; Ellen Hamlin Butler of Bangor, who has written many good poems in the past forty years, but nothing better than her recent "By Wireless," expressing, first, the call that goes forth from the hearts of the Homeland to our sailors and soldiers,
"Be strong, be strong, O Beloved, pure-hearted and high of will! Knights are ye and crusaders our plighted vows to fulfill.
The God who girded your fathers shall arm you with His might,
And the soul of the great Republic goes with you into the night."
And then the answering call that comes back to us from those on the battle front:
"Stand fast, stand fast, O Beloved! In the glory of sacrifice
Give as we give our life-blood and scorn to reckon the price.
Pour forth your treasure and spare not! Bend to your toil nor stay ! In the name of the God of our fathers keep faith as we fight today."
Would that we could linger longer with those women writers of Maine. There are others-Kate Vannah, Julia May Williamson, Anna Boynton Averill, Olive E. Dana, Julia Harris May, Annie Hamilton Don- nell, Kate Putnam Osgood, Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, to name a few, as well as some of our own time-on whose work it would be fitting and pleasant to dwell if time permitted. Let it be granted that those whom I have named will never be counted among the great makers of literature,
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still we may claim for them that they have brought to many lives that which the master poet sought when at evening time, he begged one whom "he loved :
"Come, read to me some poem Some simple and heartfelt lay That shall sooth this restless feeling And banish the thoughts of day.
Read from some humbler poet
Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer Or tears from the eyelids start.
Who, through long days of labor And nights devoid of ease, Still heard in his soul the music Of wonderful melodies.
Such songs have power to quiet
ยท The restless pulse of care, And come like the benediction That follows after prayer."
Virtually all the names that I have mentioned thus far have been those of writers born and educated in Maine, for their work constitutes, in the first sense, the contribution of Maine to literature. But no sum- mary of Maine's contribution to literature, however hurried and inade- quate it may be, can properly ignore the work of writers who have become the adopted sons or daughters of our state, or the influence of Maine on the writings of those who have found inspiration within its borders. Thus, . for example, did Maine contribute to the fame of Thoreau, who found inspiration in the depths of our great forests and on the slopes of Katah- din; and to that of Whittier, who sang of the ghost-ship of the Harpswell shore, of those who sailed up the Penobscot in search of the fabled Norum- bega, of the Indian tragedy of Norridgewock and of the legends of Sebago's lonely lake.
Surely it is an item in the total of Maine's contribution to literature that Harriet Beecher Stowe here wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the book that has had a wider circulation than any other book-except the Bible- ever published. She herself has told us how the inspiration came to her while she sat with her husband, a Bowdoin professor, at worship in Bruns- wick's Church on the Hill-the church where Longfellow read his "Mori- turi Salutamus" some twenty years later-and how she wrote the book, chapter by chapter, in the time that she snatched from the care of her children and her other household duties. The house where the book was
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written still stands on elm-shaded Federal Street, and it is yearly the shrine of hundreds of visitors to the old college town. And no visitor to the beautiful Harpswell shore fails to renew acquaintance with "The Pearl of Orr's Island."
And surely Massachusetts and Pennsylvania have no better claim on Laura E. Richards and Mrs. Riggs, better known as Kate Douglas Wig- gin, than Maine can offer-Maine, their home for many years, the scene of their work and the inspiration for the stories that have given them places in the first rank of American authors. Both Mrs. Richards in Gar- diner and Mrs. Riggs in Hollis have made unique places for themselves in the lives of their communities and in the hearts of their neighbors- places won by rare capacity for leadership and by charm of personality. Those places, no less than the numerous books that both have written with Maine scenes and Maine people in their pages, give our state a peculiar right to claim them as its own.
Similarly, to dip two generations into the past, Augusta has con- tributed Rev. Sylvester Judd to American literature. While pastor of the Unitarian church there, from 1840 to his death in 1853, he wrote several novels-Margaret, Philo and Richard Edney-that were rich in Augusta scenes and characters of that day-as well as numerous histori- cal and theological works. Nor does Waterville forget that Rev. Samuel F. Smith, the author of "My Country 'Tis of Thee," was a graduate of Colby and for years a pastor in that city.
Then there are the numerous authors of distinction, literally colonies of them in some instances, notably at York Harbor and Kennebunkport, who have established vacation homes in Maine and who come here sum- mer after summer. If we can count them neither as native writers nor as adopted sons and daughters of Maine we can at least point in almost every case to the direct influence of Maine on their writings.
And now, in closing this hurried survey of Maine's contribution to literature, let me touch briefly on the work of three of the leaders among our present day American writers-Edwin Arlington Robinson, Lincoln Colcord and Holman Day.
Edwin Arlington Robinson has been called the pioneer and the prophet of the new order in poetry. Not that he is to be held responsible for that grotesque and nightmarish distortion commonly called "free verse," from its utter lack of rhyme, rhythm and reason, style, sense and sub- stance, but that he began to write twenty years ago with a stark sincerity and simplicity that startled a reading world accustomed only to the con- ventional in poetic thought and expression. One of the most intellectual poets of his generation, highly developed and highly sensitized, Mr. Rob- inson has thrown off the shackles of inheritance and environment and with deep-probing psychology, coupled with a marvelous technique of
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workmanship, has given us noble poems of much spiritual worth. They are for the most part somber poems. There is little in them that is light and sparkling. There is much of tragedy and pain. But there is always hope and courage, and the success that is built on failure.
Edwin Arlington Robinson was born at Head Tide on the Sheepscot River in 1869. When he was a little child the family moved to Gardiner and there he passed the years of boyhood and early manhood. Gardiner is the Tilbury Town of his poems and many of the scenes and characters in his earlier poems are obviously of that city and vicinity. His first book of poems came out in 1896, shortly after the waning of the family fortunes forced him to abandon his studies at Harvard. It was a little volume, privately printed. A year later, "The Children of the Night" appeared, a collection of poems that won a larger audience and much attention worth having. Many of its poems are character sketches, unfor- gettable little vignettes, though perhaps too cynical in tone. The title poem, in its closing stanzas, gives us a glimpse of Mr. Robinson's point of view.
There is one creed, and only one, That glorifies God's excellence ; So cherish, that His will be done, The common creed of common sense.
It is the crimson, not the gray, That charms the twilight of all time;
It is the promise of the day That makes the starry sky sublime.
It is the faith within the fear That holds us to the life we curse ;-
So let us in ourselves revere The Self which is the Universe!
Let us, the Children of the Night, Put off the cloak that hides the scar! Let us be Children of the Light, And tell the ages what we are!
About that time Mr. Robinson went to New York where he faced for years, and faced very bravely, a long road with many rough places. In 1902 "Capt. Craig," his next volume of poems, appeared. The title poem is very long-84 pages-but perhaps the strongest poem in the collection is "Isaac and Archibald," apparently an autobiographical sketch of his early days in Gardiner. The book bears a dedication to a Gardiner friend of that early period. His next book, "The Town Down the River," appeared in 1910 after there was a happier change in his personal affairs. That came with
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the more general recognition of his worth as a poet when President Roose- velt, with characteristic enthusiasm and generosity, had praised some of his work. His later volumes of poems-"The Man Against the Sky" in 1916 and "Merlin" in 1917-showed the development of his powers and contain some of the noblest poetry of recent years.
"Merlin" is a tale of 1300 lines in blank verse, a re-telling of the Arthurian legend that is magnificent in some passages and tiresome in others. "The Man Against the Sky" in its title poem and in "Ben John- son Entertains a Man from Stratford" and "Flammonde," as well as in some of its shorter poems, has the work of Mr. Robinson at his best- high seriousness, extraordinary powers of condensation and epithet, a rhythm with a haunting lilt, a tenderness of understanding, vivid descrip- tion, brilliant analysis, and here and there rare lyrical outbursts as:
"As upward through her dream he fares Half clouded with a crimson fall Of roses thrown on marble stairs."
Two plays, "Van Zorn" in 1915, and "The Porcupine," in 1916, are rated by the critics below the high level of his other work.
To Lincoln Colcord of Maine it has been given to write the most sus- tained poetic work that the great war has yet inspired. When the awful storm of war burst over the world in 1914 the unspeakable horror of it all silenced for a time the voice of poetry. Then came a few notable short poems and then more and of late many, until we can see the beginnings of a great literature of poetry born of the war-some of the finest of the early notes sounded by soldier-poets who have gone bravely singing to their rendezvous with death.
When Lincoln Colcord's "Vision of War" appeared in 1916 it was hailed as the most important, the most significant, contribution of the year to poetry, and it gave a new standing to the young author who had earlier won recognition as a writer of remarkable sea stories. "The Vision of War" is a poem of 150 pages, written in blank verse and in lines uneven and irregular. It begins :
"I went out into the night of quiet stars;
I looked up at the wheeling heavens, at the mysterious firmament;
I thought of the awful distances out there, of the incredible magni- tudes, of space and silence and eternity,
I thought of man, his life, his love, his dream;
I thought of his body, how it is born and grows, and
of his spirit that cannot be explained."
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That indicates the style of the poem and sounds its note of meditation and speculation. The theme of the poet is the spiritual glory of war. He does not minimize the physical suffering, but argues that the great result of war is the purification of the nations, a purification much needed. The treatment is vigorous and incisive. There are keen discussions of the reforms that human society is struggling toward, all leading to a vision of the brotherhood of man wherein the poet sounds his faith in the ideals that shall ultimately inspire men to rise above all things that are base and mean and selfish.
Perhaps the "Vision of War" has not had so many readers as the stirring sea tales that gave Mr. Colcord his reputation as an author, but it is no less assured of a permanent place in American literature. It was the inevitable thing that Mr. Colcord began by writing sea tales. He came of five generations of the best sea-faring stock of our Maine coast and was born off Cape Horn, while his parents were on a voyage to China. His early life was divided between voyages to the Pacific with his father and periods at his Searsport home. He went to school and entered on a course at the University of Maine and then the lure of the sea and of distant lands called him again. His early stories, mainly of adventures in Pacific waters and in the Orient, found ready acceptance by the best magazines. A dozen of the strongest among them were collected in 1914 in a volume called "The Game of Life and Death." A longer work, "The Drifting Diamond," had appeared in 1912. That is a gripping. romance of China and the South Sea Islands, a tale with a salty flavor through all its pages. Lincoln Colcord has travelled far for a young writer, and the road to the summit lies straight and fair before him.
Holman Day, as a writer of Maine, in Maine and for Maine, is in a class by himself among all those whose names I have mentioned tonight. There are not a few among them with literary genius transcending his, not a few who excel him in literary craftsmanship, but as an interpreter of Maine life and character he stands unique. Other Maine-born and Maine-trained writers have often wandered elsewhere to do their work, as Edwin Arlington Robinson has gone to New York, or elsewhere for their scenes and plots, as Lincoln Colcord has gone to the Far East, but Holman Day has always found his native state not only good enough to live in and work in, but also inexhaustible in its material for his busy pen. His three volumes of verse, his two plays and his half a score of novels are Maine, and nothing but Maine, from cover to cover. They smack of the rocky hillsides where "the gnarled old dads with corded arms" have toiled
"To coax from sullen Earth the price that keeps their boys in school"; they echo with the axes that ring in the wild domain of old King Spruce
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and with the roaring of the frothing, tumbling torrents when the Allegash drive goes through; they are salty with the spume that lashes the deck of the fisherman off Isle au Haut or the tall cliffs of Grand Manan; and they are always vibrant with the loves and the longings, the dreams and the memories, of the old home.
Holman Day, born in Vassalboro beside the Kennebec in 1865, and graduated at Colby in 1887, had the experience of a dozen years in Maine newspaper work before he became a maker of books. That opportunity he improved to the utmost. He came to know Maine and its people as no newspaper writer ever did before, and everybody came to know and to like him. Thus there was a cordial welcome awaiting his first collection of poems, "Up in Maine", when it appeared in 1900. The book achieved an instantaneous success that exceeded the fondest hopes of both author and publishers. It went from edition to edition in a sale unparalleled by any volume of verse in many years. All over the land former Maine peo- ple, and the sons and daughters of Maine emigrants, hailed it as an inti- mate message from the homeland. Professional and amateur readers on every platform extended the popularity of selections from its pages. The merest mention of Maine the country over came to suggest the name and the verses of Holman Day.
Two years later "Pine Tree Ballads" appeared with seventy poems of the same sort that had carried "Up In Maine" straight to the heart of Maine folks everywhere. As a whole, the work was stronger than in the first collection. The theme was the same, but the treatment showed more confidence and often the writer struck a deeper chord. There was more seriousness, and still no lack of whimsicalities and of grotesque exaggera- tion and prevarication. Another two years passed and then "Kin O'Ktaadn" appeared-varying from its predecessors only in that there were chatty interludes of proses between the sixty or more poems.
Those three volumes alone gave Holman Day a well established place in American literature. I think it is true that no state has a poet who has done for it what Holman Day has done for Maine in those books-putting in homely, characteristic verse its life and its types, its traditions and its aspirations, with a touch always sympathetic and satisfying. No reader of those books of verse can fail to wish that the series had con- tinued, and yet we can well understand that there was a limit even to what the genius of Holman Day could produce in that line of effort.
It was inevitable that the poet should turn novelist, and happily Hol- man Day the novelist works in the same realm and in the same spirit that Holman Day the poet did. Both as a poet and as a novelist Holman Day is essentially a straightforward story teller and a delineator of quaint and wholesome types of character. If he lacks something of the art that
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develops plots most effectively, he more than makes up for it by the skill of his character sketching, his unfailing humor and the charm of his direct narrative.
"Squire Phin", his first novel, was published in 1905. In the dozen years since then he has given us "King Spruce", "The Eagle Badge", "Mayor of the Woods", "The Rainy Day Railroad War", "The Ramrodders", "The Red Lane", "On Misery Gore", "The Skipper and the Skipped", "The Landloper" and "Blow the Man Down", as well as two highly successful plays, "The Circus Man", which is a dramatized version of "Squire Phin", and "Along Came Ruth." I wish that time permitted a summary and com- ment of each work in some detail, for each is dear to the lover of Maine. The intrigues of Maine political life, the quest of the border outlaws, the ways of the great woods, the droll adventures of the old sea captain who turns farmer and sheriff, the grim battle of business competition off the shore and in the cities-these are some of the themes; and through all the stories run the bright threads of love and sacrifice and the fight of brave and loyal souls for their ideals.
With the mention of Holman Day let us close our discussion of what Maine has contributed to literature-a discussion inadequate and incom- plete, as I warned you in the beginning. Each Maine heart has among its treasures much to supplement what I have written here.
"O, thine the glory, Mother Maine, That shineth far and bright, The golden story, Mother Maine, That thrills the heart tonight. Yet not the things of pride and fame,
The great work done, the honored name,
Not they that bind our hearts to thee Through all the changing years that be,
But that forever, Mother Maine, We bless and hold thee dear,
Thou gift and giver, Mother Maine,
Because it's home up here!"
PART II SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF MAINE
1
GOVERNOR CARL E. MILLIKEN
CHAPTER XXXII
GOVERNOR AND COUNCIL
The work of the Executive Department constitutes a very important and extensive part of the business of the state. If we think of the Gov- ernor and Council as the president and board of directors of a corpora- tion, we will have on the whole a clear idea of their relation to the vari- ous activities of the state. There is annually raised by the state about eight million dollars, and all this vast sum is expended under the direction of the Governor and Council. It is impossible in a brief statement to give anything like a complete statement of the work of this department. Therefore, the following is only a brief outline of the important features of the work.
Governor's Council
The constitution and statutes set forth certain specific duties for the Executive Department. By the constitution,
the governor is constituted the supreme executive power and he is given a council of seven members to advise with him in the conduct of the affairs of state. These councillors act in much the same manner as does the Cabinet of the United States, but individually the councillors do not head a department, and they have, in addition, certain legislative functions. While the governor is elected by popular vote, the councillors are chosen biennially on joint ballot by the legislature. The state is divided into seven districts with a councillor for each district. Four department heads: the treasurer of state, the sec- retary of state, the commissioner of agriculture and the attorney general, are elected by joint ballot of the legis-
Appointment of State Officials lature. The state auditor is elected by popular vote. The governor nominates, and with the advice and consent of the council appoints, all judicial officers and all civil and military officers whose appoint- ment is not provided for otherwise by the constitution and statutes. The live stock sanitary commissioner and the chairman of the industrial acci- dent commission are appointed by the governor and do not require con- firmation by the council. The constitution also provides that the tenure of all offices not otherwise provided for shall be during the pleasure of the governor and council.
Pardons The governor has power with the advice and consent of the council to remit after conviction all forfeitures and penalties, and to grant reprieves, commutations, and pardons except in
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