Mrs. Ella Hamilton Durley, of Los Angeles, formerly of Des Moines, a pioneer president of our Press and Authors' Club, and a prolific writer for the press, followed her journal and magazine successes with two novels, "My Soldier Lady" and "Standpatter," a novel of Southern California love and politics.
Caroline M. Sheldon, Professor of Romance Languages in Grinnell College, has followed up her Midland study of American poetry with "Princess and Pilgrim in England," and a translation and study of Echegary's play, "The Great Galeoto."
Many still recall with interest the realistic serial which ran in the Midland, entitled "The Young Homesteaders," also a number of short sketches and stories of pioneer life in the West, by Frank Welles Calkins, then of Spencer, Iowa, now a Minnesotan. Mr. Calkins has since become a frequent contributor to magazines, and a writer of books of outdoor life and adventure. His latest novel, "The Wooing of Takala," appeared in 1907.
One of the marked successes in the world of books and periodicals is Julia Ellen Rogers, long a teacher of science in Iowa high schools. While a resident of Des Moines she contributed to the Midland a descriptive article, "Camping and Climbing in the Big Horn," which evinced her love of "all outdoors" and her ability to describe what she saw. Her editorial connection with Country Life in America and her popular series of nature studies, "Among Green Trees," "Trees Every Child Should Know," "Earth and Sky," "Wild Animals Every Child Should Know," have given their author and her books a warm welcome from Maine to California.
One of the bright particular stars in our firmament, remaining almost undiscovered until near the close of the century's first decade, is Arthur Davison Ficke, of Davenport. Circumstances—his father's eminence at the bar—conspired to make the young poet a lawyer; but he could not—long at a time—close his ears to the wooing of the muse, and off he went, at frequent intervals, in hot pursuit of the elusive Euterpe. Though still a lawyer of record, the inward call of the soul must soon become too strong to be resisted. Poeta nascitur. I can see the young lawyer-poet in his own "Dream Harbor," and can feel his glad response to the call from the dream-world:
"Winds of the South from the sunny beaches
Under the headland call to me;
And I am sick for the purple reaches,
Olive-fringed, by an idle sea.
"Where low waves of the South are calling