You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God, he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
Church, as one intimate wrote upon his death, after more than thirty years with the Sun, had all the literary gifts, “the tender fancy, the sympathetic understanding of human nature, the humour, now wistful, now joyous, the unsurpassed delicacy of touch.”
WILLIAM M. LAFFAN
In dramatic criticism, where the Sun has required from its writers somewhat more than the mere ability to praise or blame, its roster bears such names as Frank Bowman, Willard Bartlett, Elihu Root, William Stewart (“Walsingham”), who was the first of the dramatic critics to adopt an intimate style; Andrew Carpenter Wheeler, better known to the public under his pen-name of “Nym Crinkle,” whose reviews were a feature of the Sunday issue of the Sun; William M. Laffan, the always brilliant and sometimes caustic; Franklin Fyles, who wrote plays as well as reviews of plays; John Corbin, the scholarly analyst; Walter Prichard Eaton, author of “The American Stage of To-day,” and Lawrence Reamer, who has been with the Sun, as reporter or critic, for a quarter of a century.
In criticism of opera and other musical events the Sun, through the writings of William J. Henderson, has pleased the general public as well as the musicians, and has added many sound and scholarly chapters to newspaper literature.
In book-reviewing a hundred pens have served the Sun. Hazeltine, E. P. Mitchell, Willard Bartlett, Erasmus D. Beach, George Bendelari, Miss Dana Gatlin, H. M. Anderson, and Grant M. Overton are but a few of the men and women who have told Sun readers what’s worth while.
For Sun reporters the Sunday paper has been a favourable field for an excursion into fiction-writing. In its columns a man with a tale to tell has every chance. There William Norr gave, in his “Pearl of Chinatown,” the real atmosphere of a little part of New York that once held romance. It was for the Sunday Sun that Edward W. Townsend created his celebrated characters, Chimmie Fadden, Miss Fanny, Mr. Paul, and the rest of that happy, if slangy, family. Clarence L. Cullen laid bare the soul of alcoholic adventurers in his “Tales of the Ex-Tanks.” Ed Mott made famous the bears of Pike County, Pennsylvania. David A. Curtis related the gambling ways of Old Man Greenlaw and his associates. Charles Lynch conferred the title of the Duke of Essex Street upon an obscure lawyer, and made him the talk of the East Side. Joseph Goodwin brought to the notice of an ignorant world the ways of Sarsaparilla Reilly and other Park Row restaurant heroes. David Graham Phillips, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and other men destined to be known through their books, ground out, for glory and eight dollars a column, the yarns—sometimes fact turned into fiction, sometimes fiction masked as fact—that kept the readers of the Sunday Sun from getting out into the open air.