THE MOTHERS OF THE WEST
[From Miami Woods, A Golden Wedding, and Other Poems (Cincinnati, 1881)]
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
Stout-hearted dames were they;
With nerve to wield the battle-brand,
And join the border fray.
Our rough land had no braver
In its days of blood and strife—
Aye ready for severest toil,
Aye free to peril life.
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
On old Kentucky's soil,
How shared they, with each dauntless band,
War's tempest, and life's toil!
They shrank not from the foeman,
They quail'd not in the fight,
But cheer'd their husbands through the day,
And soothed them through the night.
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
Their bosoms pillow'd Men;
And proud were they by such to stand
In hammock, fort, or glen;
To load the sure old rifle—
To run the leaden ball—
To watch a battling husband's place,
And fill it should he fall.
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
Such were their daily deeds:
Their monument—where does it stand?
Their epitaph—who reads?
No braver dames had Sparta—
No nobler matrons Rome—
Yet who or lauds or honors them,
Ev'n in their own green home?
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
They sleep in unknown graves;
And had they borne and nursed a band
Of ingrates, or of slaves,
They had not been more neglected!
But their graves shall yet be found,
And their monuments dot here and there
"The Dark and Bloody Ground!"
[THOMAS H. SHREVE]
Thomas H. Shreve, poet and journalist, was born at Alexandria, Virginia, in 1808. In early life he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and entered mercantile pursuits. In 1834 Shreve became a Cincinnati editor; but four years later he returned to Louisville to again engage in business. Throughout his business career, Shreve was a constant contributor of poems and prose sketches to the best magazines. He finally abandoned business for literature, and he at once became associate editor of the Louisville Journal. He was not a rugged journalist of the Prentice type, but a cultured and chaste essayist who should have written from his study window, rather than from such a seething hothouse of sarcasm and invective as Prentice maintained. He was a mild-mannered man, a Quaker, who spent his last months on earth in crossing swords with Thomas Babington Macaulay concerning the character of William Penn. In 1851 Shreve's Drayton, an American Tale, was issued by the Harpers at New York. This work won the author much praise in the East as well as in the West, and it started him upon an honorable career, which was soon cut short by disease. Thomas H. Shreve died at Louisville, December 23, 1853. Prentice penned a splendid tribute to the memory of his dead friend and associate; and some years later a collection of his verse was made as a fitting memorial of his blameless life and literary labors.