Bibliography. Southern Writers, by W. P. Trent (New York, 1905); letters from Mr. Rule to the Author.
WHAT RIGHT HAST THOU?[68]
[From When John Bull Comes A Courtin' (Louisville, Kentucky, 1903)]
What right hast thou to more than thou dost need
While others perish for the want of bread?
What right hast thou upon a palace bed
To idly slumber while the homeless plead;
A vicious and voluptuous life to lead,
While millions struggle on in rags and shame?
What right hast thou thus vilely to inflame
Thy fellow men with hate, O fiend of greed?
What right hast thou to take the hallowed name
Of God upon thy lips, or Christ's, who came
To save the race from sorrows thou dost cause?
Not always helpless 'neath thy cruel paws,
O Beast of Capital, shall Labor lie;
Thy doom this day is thundered from the sky!
THE NEW KNIGHTHOOD
[From the same]
Arise, my soul, put off thy dark despair;
Say not the age of chivalry is gone;
For lo, the east is kindling with its dawn,
And bugle echoes bid thee wake to wear
Majestic moral armour, and to bear
A worthy part in truth's eternal fray.
Say not the muse inspires no more to-day,
Nor that fame's flowers no longer flourish fair.
Live thou sublimely and then speak thy heart,
If thou wouldst build an altar unto art.
Stand with the struggling and the stars above
Will shower celestial thoughts to thrill thy pen.
Put self away and walk alone with Love,
And thou shalt be the marvel of all men!
[EVA WILDER BRODHEAD]
Mrs. Eva Wilder (McGlasson) Brodhead, novelist and short-story writer, was born at Covington, Kentucky, in 187-. Her parents were not of Southern origin, her father having been born in Nova Scotia, and her mother at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was educated in New York City and in her native town of Covington. She began to write when but eighteen years of age, and a short time thereafter her first novel appeared, Diana's Livery (New York, 1891). This was set against a background most alluring: the Shaker settlement at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, into which a young man of the world enters and falls in love with a pretty Shakeress. Her second story, An Earthly Paragon (New York, 1892), which was written in three weeks, ran through Harper's Weekly before being published in book form. It was a romance of the Kentucky mountains, laid around Chamouni, the novelist's name for Yosemite, Kentucky. It was followed by a novelette of love set amidst the salt-sea atmosphere of an eastern watering place, Ministers of Grace (New York, 1894). Hildreth, the scene of this little story, is anywhere along the Jersey coast from Atlantic City to Long Branch. Ministers of Grace also appeared serially in Harper's Weekly, and when it was issued in book form Col. Henry Watterson called the attention of Richard Mansfield to it as a proper vehicle for him, and the actor promptly secured the dramatic rights, hoping to present it upon the stage; but his untimely death prevented the dramatization of the tale under highly favorable auspices. It was the last to be published under the name of Eva Wilder McGlasson, as this writer was first known to the public, for on December 5, 1894, she was married in New York to Mr. Henry C. Brodhead, a civil and mining engineer of Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Brodhead's next novelette, One of the Visconti (New York, 1896), the background of which was Naples, the hero being a young Kentuckian and the heroine of the old and famous Visconti family, was issued by the Scribner's in their well-known Ivory Series of short-stories. Her last Kentucky novel, Bound in Shallows (New York, 1896), originally appeared in Harper's Bazar. That severe arbiter of literary destinies, The Nation, said of this book: "No such work as this has been done by any American woman since Constance Fenimore Woolson died." It was founded on material gathered at Burnside, Kentucky, where Mrs. Brodhead spent two summers. Her most recent work, A Prairie Infanta (Philadelphia, 1904), is a Colorado juvenile, first published in The Youth's Companion. Aside from her books, Mrs. Brodhead won a wide reputation as a short-story writer and maker of dialect verse. More than fifty of her stories have been printed in the publications of the house of Harper, the publishers of four of her books; in The Century, Scribner's, and other leading periodicals. Many of her admirers hold that the short-story is her especial forte. Five of them may be mentioned as especially well done: Fan's Mammy, A Child of the Covenant, The Monument to Corder, The Eternal Feminine, and Fair Ines. She has written much dialect verse which appeared in the Harper periodicals, The Century, Judge, Puck, and other magazines. Neither her short-stories nor her verse has been collected and issued in book form. Since her marriage Mrs. Brodhead has traveled in Europe a great deal, and in many parts of the United States, traveled until she sometimes wonders whether her home is in Denver or New York, and, although she is in the metropolis more than she is in the Colorado capital, her legal residence is Denver, some distance from the mining town of Brodhead, named in honor of her husband's geological discoveries and interests. In 1906 she was stricken with a very severe illness, followed by her physician's absolute mandate of no literary work until her health should be reëstablished, which has been accomplished but recently. She has published but a single story since her sickness, Two Points of Honor, which appeared in Harper's Weekly for July 4, 1908. At the present time Mrs. Brodhead is quite well enough to resume work; and the next few years should witness her fulfilling the earnest of her earlier novels and stories, firmly fixing her fame as one of the foremost women writers of prose fiction yet born on Kentucky soil.