USA > Vermont > Vermonters : a book of biographies > Part 14
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tributor, and of which he was for many years a member of the editorial staff. He contributed articles on phases of New Eng- land life, illustrated with sketches, to SCRIBNER's, the ATLANTIC MONTHLY, and CENTURY MAGAZINE.
In 1886, the Forest and Stream Publishing Company issued the paper covered FOREST AND STREAM FABLES, written and il- lustrated by Rowland Robinson. In the following year (1887) a series of sketches which he had contributed to that paper were published in book form under the title UNCLE LISHA'S SHOP -LIFE IN A CORNER OF YANKEELAND. These stories have their setting in the imaginary nineteenth century village of Danvis, Vermont, and in them are introduced his most loved characters, Uncle Lisha Peggs, Sam Lovel, Gran'ther Hill, and Antoine Bas- sette. SAM LOVEL'S CAMPS, the second of the Danvis stories, appeared in 1889, and DANVIS FOLKS in 1894.
Mr. Robinson's active and long standing interest in the early history of his state resulted in the request of Houghton, Mifflin and Company that he contribute the volume on Vermont to their American Commonwealth Series. VERMONT-A STUDY OF INDEPENDENCE, a significant and human history embodying careful research, appeared in 1892.
In the meantime Mr. Robinson's eyes, which had for a long time suffered from the strain of overwork, failed steadily, and by 1893 he was totally blind. While he was no longer able to make the sketches and drawings that he loved, his creative en- ergy found expression in his writing. He was able to work with the aid of a grooved board by means of which he could guide his pencil, and the manuscripts were prepared for the publisher by his devoted wife. Mr. Robinson's fortitude in the face of ad- versity, his vital interest in his work, his unfailing energy and good cheer, won for him a personal recognition which rivalled that accorded to his literary accomplishments. Six books were written after his blindness: three stories with historical back- grounds of early Vermont-A HERO OF TICONDEROGA, IN THE GREEN WOOD, and A DANVIS PIONEER; two additions to the
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group of Danvis stories-UNCLE LISHA'S OUTING and SAM LOVEL'S BOY; and one book devoted exclusively to sketches of nature-IN NEW ENGLAND FIELDS AND WOODS.
Mr. Robinson died at his home on October 15, 1900. He was buried in the Robinson family lot at Ferrisburgh, Vermont. Since his death there have been published three volumes of col- lected stories and sketches: OUT OF BONDAGE AND OTHER STORIES, and HUNTING WITHOUT A GUN AND OTHER PAPERS in 1905, and SILVER FIELDS AND OTHER SKETCHES OF A FARM- ER SPORTSMAN in 1921.
Rowland Evans Robinson has made a significant and valuable contribution to the literature of Vermont. His stories of Danvis present a cross-section of Vermont life in the middle of the nineteenth century. He has drawn his backgrounds with ac- curacy; he has created characters who are authentic and human and lovable; he has recorded with fidelity their characteristic speech, revealing his mastery of both the Yankee dialect and the Canuck. His historical work is characterized by careful and thorough research. His descriptive sketches of the life of wood, field, and stream are distinguished by his power to recapture the moods and the spirit of nature, his sense of music and of rhythm, and his artistry in words. Mr. Robinson's keen power of ob- servation, his insight into both nature and human nature, his kindly humor, his love for the places and for the men and women of whom he writes, make him an accurate and sympa- thetic portrayer of Vermont background and character.
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THOMAS ROWLEY
By Walter John Coates
W ITH the possible exception of the Reverend Bunker Gay who as early as 1764 came to Vernon, Vermont, as a circuit preacher and who wrote poetry there, Thomas Rowley was the first Green Mountain poet of whom we have any authentic record. He was the "Pioneer Minstrel of Ver- mont." Known in his own section of the state as "the Shore- ham Bard," his was the first lyric voice to be raised, the first lyric influence to be felt and honored among the vigorous folk who established our commonwealth. His name and place are firmly fixed among the outstanding pioneer figures of early Vermont life.
Thomas Rowley came of old English stock, the ancestral home being near Shrewsbury, England. His first American forbear, Henry Rowley, coming over from Leyden about 1630, settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts, for his name ap- pears in the tax list of that colony for 1632. In the third generation of descent from this Pilgrim Father appeared Sam- uel Rowley (1688-1767) who lived in Hebron, Connecticut, having settled there shortly after his marriage to Elizabeth Fuller; and to this couple were born eight children, the fourth being our pioneer minstrel of Vermont.
He was born at Hebron, March 24, 1721. Of his early education we know next to nothing. That he had a trained mind his later work amply shows; but it must be remembered that in those days home training was in many cases equivalent to our best college training of today-and in rare cases even superior. In 1744, at the age of twenty-three, Rowley was married to Lois Cass, who was born in 1727, daughter of Moses and Mary (Hoskins) Cass of Hebron. It was the migratory period in early New England history-the beginning of that
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urge which later peopled the wild territories of Vermont, Kentucky, Ohio, and the western plains with adventurous seekers and home builders; and Thomas and Lois were more or less afire with the fever of the times. They lived in Kent, Connecticut, from 1753 to 1758. They also lived for a time at Salisbury in the same state.
Rowley was now in the prime of life. He was forty-seven years old. The stirring movements of his day could not pass unheeded in a temperament as mercurial and sensitive as his. In his case, as in many others, the frontier attraction lay to the northward. The as yet untilled and untamed vales and forest- clad mountains of that region lying between Lake Champlain and the upper Connecticut valley were calling. And like his neighbors who eventually settled and quelled most of this No- Man's-Land of the North, his ear was attuned to the call. In 1768, he and his wife and family started northward and estab- lished themselves on a two-hundred-acre farm in Danby, just south of Rutland. Here Rowley at once assumed a leading role among the settlers. Beside clearing and working his own farm, he acted as surveyor and clerk for the township's pro- prietors until 1783. When the town was organized in 1769, he became the first town clerk, a position which he held almost continuously until 1782. He was town treasurer from 1769-70; selectman, 1779-80; town representative, 1778-82; and he was justice of the peace for six years. He was promi- nent in the early history of Rutland County, being the first judge of the special county court. In the stirring days of the Revolution, and the period preparatory thereto, he was a staunch member of the Green Mountain Boys, co-operating with Allen, Warner, Baker and others in their various acts of resistance to the aggressions of New York. In fact, it was by the trenchant and animated rhymes he wrote and recited during this long and acrimonious controversy, the frank and naive propaganda verse which appeared spontaneously and unceasingly from his mouth and pen, that he first gained dis-
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tinction as a wit and bard, being known far and wide as the "Minstrel of the Green Mountains." He was the popular idol of the western settlements of the New Hampshire Grants. Like Ira Allen he was ready with arm, voice and pen to ad- vance the interests of the nascent republic, supporting it in field, in press and in legislative chamber. Frederick W. Payne (cf. HARTFORD TIMES of Oct. 16, 1926) says of him: "Dur- ing his many terms of service in the legislature, if a subject was referred to a committee with instructions to report by a bill, he was almost invariably named as its chairman, and the bills drafted and reported by him would always 'hold water.'"
But Rowley was first and foremost a poet and wit. If Ethan Allen was the Simon de Montfort of Vermont, Thomas Row- ley was its Wyclif and its Chaucer rolled into one. He roused its spirit, hurled its denunciations; yet he also warbled its lyric and improvised its after-dinner puns. When Allen and other popular leaders were adjudged guilty of felony by New York courts and condemned to death without benefit of clergy (a deprivation which must have been highly amusing to Ethan), Rowley aided them in drawing up their protest thereto, appending to their prose document his memorable lines :
"When Caesar reigned king at Rome, St. Paul was sent to hear his doom; For Roman law in a criminal case Must have the parties face to face, Or Caesar gives a flat denial. But here's a law now made of late Which destines men to awful fate And hangs and damns without a trial."
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Rowley was an improvisator of verse, being able and ready at a moment's warning to compose and recite appropriate words on any subject. Wearing a shabby old hat, Rowley once went up to Appollos Austin's store in Orwell; and after
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some joking, Austin offered, if Rowley would make an im- promptu verse, to give him a new hat. Taking off his old cover, Rowley looked earnestly at it a moment, and said :
"Here's my old hat, No matter for that, It's as good as the rest of my raiment; If I buy me a better You'll set me down debtor, And send me to jail for the payment."
His wit was pungent and epigrammatic; and though his verse was lacking in finish, his rhymes being often lame and imperfect, yet they were, for that very reason, as Pliny White says, "all the more acceptable among a people who were them- selves rough in all their ways, and with whom strength, whether of muscle or of mind, was one of the cardinal vir- tues." (cf. EARLY POETS OF VERMONT, 1860 8 vo., 33 pp.) Cer- tainly this pioneer singer, who is said to have "set the moun- tains on fire by the inspiration of his muse," was a notable figure in his day-the like of which our modern regimented civilization could not produce.
His longest and most popular poem, according to Pliny White, was his "Invitation to the Poor Tenants That Live under their Patroons in New York to Come and Settle on our Good Land under the New Hampshire Grants." This poem was written upon the attempt and subsequent failure of the Yorkers to execute their "Writs of Possession" in the debated territory. The Green Mountain settlers were not to be thus easily dispossessed, and Rowley reflected their mood in his poem which was printed in broadside form and ex- tensively circulated. (cf. J. C. Williams' THE HISTORY AND MAP OF DANBY, 1869, pp. 240-63 for this and other of Row- ley's poems.)
Rowley's published verse was mostly printed in two maga- zines or weeklies: The VERMONT GAZETTE at Bennington, pub-
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lished by Anthony Haswell, and THE RURAL MAGAZINE at Rut- land, published by Samuel Williams, 1795-96. A poem by Saxe, Dorr or Cady could hardly be more prized by later pub- lishers than were Rowley's rough rhymes by the periodicals of his time. His lines were read and recited everywhere in the state; but since then they have gradually faded from recol- lection, until only fragments of his work are now available, even to the student.
Rowley was of medium height and rather thick-set, and was very alert and rapid in his movements. His eyes were light in color, sprightly and piercing, and very expressive. He was very careless of personal appearance, quick and apt in repartee, quick in thought, ready in debate, intuitively able in rhyming. But he was also well fitted for more sober and responsible work. He was a member of the Baptist church at Danby, but was a liberal in thought, as his ODE ON PREDES- TINATION amply shows.
After the Revolutionary War Rowley removed to Shore- ham, where he lived for a number of years with his son Nathan. The last year of his life found him contributing regularly to THE RURAL MAGAZINE. And that last year he also wrote the following :
Old Seventy-five is still alive, A poor declining poet; These lines he sends unto his friends That they who read may know it.
He died at Cold Springs in West Haven, Vermont, in August, 1796, leaving a large family of children to perpetuate his name. THE VERMONT GAZETTE of September 2, 1796, in announcing the demise of this "justly celebrated Green Moun- tain Patriarch," says: "As a poet he was blessed with a happy genius, and was not behind many who have made a great noise and figure in the world." Six years after his death there was printed (1802) a pamphlet of twenty-three pages entitled
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SELECTIONS & MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF THOMAS ROWLEY; whether this work is now extant is very doubtful. The dis- covery of it-if it now exists-would be an event of great importance to all students of Vermont literature, as Rowley's work is of tremendous historical and literary significance in any adequate appraisal of the early epic voice of our Green Mountain people.
JOHN GODFREY SAXE
By Arthur Wallace Peach
OA NE of the most interesting facts of literary history has to do with the manner in which the details of the life of a poet, his personality, and his achievements may pass from pop- ular memory, while his poems, frequently in fragmentary form, remain permanently a part of the literature of the past that yields readily to quotation. John Godfrey Saxe as a lawyer, politician, lecturer, and an editor has receded into the past; as a poet, he is the author of numberless quotations that appear here and there in contemporary speeches, articles, sketches, and in the general newspaper press. Such quotations, moreover, are not drawn sporadically from a few specific poems but widely from the entire body of his works. While the poems quoted belong as a rule to the type of poetry known as "light" or "fa- miliar" verse, yet here and there some tender and wistful bit of musing has survived as, for instance, in the poem BEREAVE- MENT. In the sense specified, Saxe remains today a popular poet in America, although the details of his life and personality have vanished into brief comments in encyclopedias and literary his- tories.
Ample evidence of his popularity in his day as a lecturer and writer is available. As a lecturer, it is doubtful if he was sur-
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passed by any one of his contemporaries, even the leaders among the Cambridge group. He was a special favorite with university audiences ; and some of his most successful readings and lectures were given before such bodies. Mention might be made of his reading of THE MONEY-KING at Yale University, THE PRESS be- fore the literary societies of Brown University, and PROGRESS: A SATIRICAL POEM before the Associated Alumni of Middlebury College in 1846. He was also a favorite contributor to the early magazines, particularly the first of the popular New York mag- azines to attain a permanent success, THE KNICKERBOCKER. We find his contributions winning as general popular approval as that accorded to the work of his fellow-contributors, Longfellow, Bryant, and Irving; and it may be noted in passing that he was personally popular with these authors to whom time has granted a greater measure of fame.
Although he could, and did, write poems that had their gen- esis in tenderness of mood and feeling, his major interest was in satire, travesty, and humor. His satirical poem, PROGRESS, deal- ing with the fashions and foibles of his day-it has significance still, and is well worth reading-created a sensation when it ap- peared, and it was more widely quoted than any other satirical verse or prose of the period. Travesty, fringed with grotesque fancies, is found in THE FLYING DUTCHMAN; OR THE WRATH OF HERR VONSTOPPLENOSE, and his gift of humor, rising and descending to the use of puns of all varieties, is found through- out his work. Some indications of the popularity of all forms of his verse can be seen in the fact that eighteen different works appeared over his name, and that his POEMS, first published in 1850, went through some forty editions. The last edition of Saxe appeared in 1905 under the imprint of Houghton, Mifflin and Company. While the book is now out of print, copies are still extant. This volume includes some perennial favorites- EARLY RISING, THE PROUD MISS MACBRIDE, RHYME OF THE RAIL, and TO A CLAM.
Part of the failure of Saxe to rise to greater heights in his
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verse and poetic career is undoubtedly due to the demands made upon his time by activities that were to him major interests. Such writing as he did was limited by these demands as even a brief survey of his life, covering its chief literary and professional phases, may indicate. He was born at Highgate, Vermont, June 22, 1816, and from nine until seventeen years of age worked on his father's farm. He attended the grammar school at St. Al- bans, entered Wesleyan University, in 1835, then Middlebury College from which he was graduated in 1839. Taking up the study of law in Lockport, New York, and St. Albans, Vermont, he was admitted to the bar in the latter place in 1843. For one year, 1847-48, he was superintendent of common schools for Chittenden County; and it was during this time that he published his first work, PROGRESS. In 1850, he became editor of the BURLINGTON (Vermont) SENTINEL, and in the same year his volume of poems under the title POEMS was published, which was in the next twenty-three years to go through thirty-eight editions. From 1850 to 1851 he was state's attorney for his county, and in 1856 he was appointed United States deputy col- lector of customs. Politics drew his attention, and in 1859 and 1860 he was the candidate of the Democratic party for the governorship of the state. Within the next nine years, he pub- lished four volumes: THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, THE MONEY- KINGS, THE TIMES, and CLEVER STORIES. In 1872, he assumed the editorship of the ALBANY (New York) EVENING JOURNAL. While in Albany, he won his widest fame as a lecturer and pub- lished one of his most popular books, THE PROUD MISS MAC- BRIDE. He became in his later years a victim to confirmed mel- ancholy, and after a brief residence at Brooklyn, New York, lived in seclusion at his son's home in Albany, New York, refusing to receive company. He died there March 31, 1887. In the same year, the Houghton Mifflin Company published their "Household Edition" of THE POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN GODFREY SAXE. In August, 1920, the state of Vermont dedicated at the Saxe home- stead in Highgate a monument to the poet's memory.
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As suggested at the beginning of this sketch, popular and literary interest in the poet's life seems to have passed, but without question a wider interest than the casual student of American literature realizes exists in his poetry. A significant fact in support of this dictum may be found in Burton E. Steven- son's standard HOME BOOK OF VERSE, where we find thirteen poems by Saxe listed, a larger number than is credited to other poets of America whose personalities and lives are far more generally known.
STUART P. SHERMAN
By Arthur Wallace Peach
P ROPHESYING the future of a literary reputation is always a doubtful venture, but it is probably safe to say that the literary historian of the future will find in Stuart P. Sherman the most eloquent of all voices of our day that have spoken in defense of the traditional attitudes of mind and heart that we associate with New England. In the early years of the conflict between Puritan and anti-Puritan critics and writers, when New England thought seemed to be losing ground as an integral part of American philosophy, the need of such a voice was apparent. An interesting phase of this contest, symbolic of its entire sweep, is seen in the duel between Sherman and the alert H. L. Mencken, at present the brilliant editor of THE AMERICAN MERCURY. Mr. Mencken, who by inheritance, education and training has little sympathy with and limited understanding of the Puritan point of view, who is still puzzled by what happened at Bunker Hill, found in Sherman a worthy foeman and defender of the Puritan faith. Sherman entered the fray at a critical time when the onslaught by Mr. Mencken and his cohorts against
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New England ideals and points of view was making definite headway-an attack whose motive can be summed up in the re- mark of a New York sculptor of the same hue to the effect that he understood that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, but that it was a pity the rock had not landed on the Pilgrims.
Space does not permit a discussion of the merry conflict be- tween the two able leaders of opposing philosophies. Readers will find in the two volumes of THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF STUART P. SHERMAN by Zeitlin and Woodbridge the complete story of the varying fortunes of the contest and an analysis of the deeper forces in American life that the two men represented. For the purposes of the present sketch it must suffice to say that Sherman was an effective leader. When he was lured to New York from the West to become editor of Books, he seemed for a time to have deserted to the enemy, and proof can be offered in a specific way to establish the fact. Actually, however, as any careful review of his critical writing during his New York period will reveal, the tempering of his point of view was the result of a gradual growth into a liberalism that is, after all, characteristic of the finest New England spirit. To the end, in all the inner and profound aspects of his personality and philoso- phy, he remained a true son of New England.
Iowa may justly claim him by reason of his birth in Anita, October 1, 1881, but Vermont and New England also may pre- sent claims that transcend the mere fact of his birthplace. His father, John Sherman, a Vermont farmer-lawyer with a touch of genius, was born in Fairhaven, Vermont, in 1849. His mother was the daughter of Parsons Stuart Pratt, a pastor in Dorset, Vermont, for forty-one years. In 1875, the Shermans left Ver- mont and went to California, but, borrowing the phraseology of the book mentioned above, "some ill fortune guided" John Sherman's "choice to the little town of Anita, Iowa." The Shermans, seeking to find some climate that promised more ro- bust health for Mr. Sherman, moved next to Rolfe, Iowa, to a farm "where the blizzards raged in winter and the cyclones
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scorched in summer." Later, the family sought a home in Cali- fornia, where the father died in 1892. Friends took Stuart to Arizona into a mining region, a period in his life which, as a . result of bringing him in touch with miners and other men of a rough and ready character, gave him a sense of balance that enabled him to judge men not merely by word but by deed. From Arizona he came to Vermont and to school at the Troy Conference Academy at Poultney, Vermont. His college educa- tion was secured at Williams College, from which he was gradu- ated in 1903, and in that year he began his graduate study at Harvard University. In 1906, he accepted an appointment to an instructorship in English literature at the University of Illinois where in the course of time he became the head of the De- partment of English.
A polemic in the NATION directed at the system of graduate study at Harvard caught the attention of editors, and with the articles that followed their invitations to submit contributions Sherman's literary career definitely began. It became evident quickly that an unusual mind, fortified by a wide knowledge of English literature and a marked grasp of the difficult factors that underlie periods of drift and change in literary movements, had made its appearance on the contemporary scene. His first book of general significance, in which he turned his attention to writers and literary movements of the day, ON CONTEMPORARY LITERA- TURE, 1917, made a pronounced impression, both in the original- ity of its thought and in the phrasing of a literary philosophy that had not, heretofore, been effectively formulated or pre- sented. The promise in this volume was fulfilled in later books- THE GENIUS OF AMERICA, 1923; LETTERS TO A LADY IN THE COUNTRY, 1925; CRITICAL WOODCUTS, 1926.
In 1924, he resigned his professorship at the University of Il- linois to become the editor of BOOKS, a weekly literary journal published in New York by the Herald Tribune Company. The magazine gave him the opportunity that he needed for the unhampered use of his unusual talent; and he quickly made
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Books a journal to be reckoned with in the general field of literary journalism. His leading articles, tempered in points of view, based on extended knowledge and power of statement, presenting, as has been suggested, a growing liberalism that at the same time did not lean toward the radical, the unformed, the merely experimental. The emphasis on the disciplined life, the unhurried outlook, the belief that the past has its lessons that should be heeded; the emphasis on the necessity of doing"little tasks in the light of great principles" -- these points of view, traditionally Puritan, can be traced through his articles and re- views, even in instances when the winds of new doctrines of style and theme were blowing through the literary world.
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