Of all men, saving Sylla, the man-slayer,
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the greatest names which in our faces stare,
The General Boone, back-woodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere;
For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoy'd the lonely, vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.
In 1827 Alfred Tennyson, with his brother Charles, published a slender sheaf of juvenile verses, entitled Poems By Two Brothers. On Sublimity contains eleven stanzas of ten lines each. The poet disdains "vales in tenderest green," and asks for "the wild cascade, the rugged scene," the sea, the mountains, dark cathedrals, storms, "Niagara's flood of matchless might," and Mammoth Cave.
The hurricane fair earth to darkness changing,
Kentucky's chambers of eternal gloom,[1]
The swift-pac'd columns of the desert ranging
Th' uneven waste, the violent Simoom
The snow-clad peaks, stupendous Gungo-tree!
Whence springs the hallow'd Jumna's echoing tide,
Hear Cotopaxi's cloud-capt majesty,
Enormous Chimborazo's naked pride,
The dizzy Cape of winds that cleaves the sky,
Whence we look down into eternity,
The pillar'd cave of Morven's giant king
The Yanar, and the Geyser's boiling fountain,
The deep volcano's inward murmuring,
The shadowy Colossus of the mountain;
Antiparos, where sun-beams never enter;
Loud Stromboli, amid the quaking isles;
The terrible Maelstroom, around his centre
Wheeling his circuit of unnumber'd miles:
These, these are sights and sounds that freeze the blood,
Yet charm the awe-struck soul which doats on solitude.
Tennyson was the third and last English poet of the nineteenth century to make mention of Kentucky in his works.
Much writing has been done by Kentuckians from the beginning until the present time, but most of what is usually termed literature is the work of the school of today. That much, however, of the early productions, especially the anonymous and fugitive poems, have been forever lost, may be gathered from a letter written to Edwin Bryant, editor of The Lexington Intelligencer, by an Ohio correspondent, which appeared in that paper in January, 1834, a part of which is as follows:
There were a vast number of rural and sentimental songs, sung by the hunters and pioneers, that, in this our day, to the present generation would be truly interesting. Would it not be wise for you, Messrs. Editors, to publish a note in your valuable paper, offering the "Poets' Corner," and save what you can of the fragments of "Olden Times?"... I know that there were many sentimental pieces—some written by a Mr. Bullock—many war songs; one on St. Clair's defeat; and there was a wonderful flow of poetical effusions on the first discovery of a settlement of Kentucky. There was a wooing song of the hunter—one stanza I can only repeat:
"I will plough and live, and you may knit and sowe,
And through the wild woods, I'll hunt the buffaloe!"To many these things may appear as ... light as empty air, but look to the future, and you will at once discover the inquisitive mind will earnestly desire to look into such matters and things.
The pity is, this admonition passed unheeded by Bryant and his contemporaries, and much that "the inquisitive mind" would revel in to-day, was thus lost. The most famous, however, of the pioneer songs that the above quoted writer probably had in mind, The Hunters of Kentucky, the celebrated ballad of the Battle of New Orleans, has come down to us, but it was written by the alien hand of Samuel Woodworth, who achieved a double triumph over oblivion by also writing The Old Oaken Bucket. And were other "wooing songs of the hunter" extant, we would certainly discover that many of them were done by non-Kentuckians. Even Kentucky Belle, ballad of Morgan and his men, was the work of Constance Fenimore Woolson, the famous author of Anne.
In recent years the ballads of the Kentucky mountains have been investigated by a group of scholars, and Dr. Hubert Gibson Shearin will shortly publish a collection of them. It is impossible to discuss them at this time; and as nearly all of them are offshoots of the old English ballads and Scottish songs, done over by their Kentucky descendants, the ever-recurring question: "Are they Kentucky productions?" will not down.
II
THE KENTUCKY MAGAZINES