As has been said, Mr. Wilson was the presiding genius of the town of Frankfort during his life there; and he was a bachelor! Thereby hangs a tale with a meaning and a moral. For many years the widows and the other women past their bloom, burned incense at the shrine of the mighty man who could wrap himself in his great-coat, dash through a field and over a fence, punching plants with his never-absent stick, and return to town with a poem pounding in his pulses, and another landscape in his brain. Ah, he was a great fellow! But the tragedy of it all: after all these years of adoration from ladies overanxious to get him into their nets, they awoke one morning in 1901 to find that little Anne Hendrick, schoolgirl, and daughter of a former attorney-general of Kentucky, had married their heart's desire, that their dreams were day-dreams after all. The marriage took place in New York, after which they returned to Frankfort. The following year their child, Elizabeth, was born; and a short time afterwards he removed to New York, where he has lived ever since. Rumors of his art exhibitions have reached Kentucky; but the only tangible things have been prose papers and lyrics in the magazines.
A short time before his death, Paul Hamilton Hayne, the famous Southern poet, sent Wilson this greeting: "The old man whose head has grown gray in the service of the Muses, who is about to leave the lists of poetry forever, around whose path the sunset is giving place to twilight, with no hope before him but 'an anchorage among the stars,' extends his hand to a younger brother of his art with an earnest Te moriturus saluto." These charming words were elicited by June Days, and When Evening Cometh On.
Bibliography. The Recent Movement in Southern Literature, by C. W. Coleman, Jr. (Harper's Magazine, May, 1887); Who's Who in America (1901-1902); Library of Southern Literature (Atlanta, v. xv, 1910), an excellent study by Mrs. Ida W. Harrison.
LOVINGLY TO ELIZABETH, MY MOTHER[8]
[From Life and Love. Poems (New York, 1887)]
The green Virginian hills were blithe in May,
And we were plucking violets—thou and I.
A transient gladness flooded earth and sky;
Thy fading strength seemed to return that day,
And I was mad with hope that God would stay
Death's pale approach—Oh! all hath long passed by!
Long years! Long years! and now, I well know why
Thine eyes, quick-filled with tears, were turned away.
First loved; first lost; my mother:—time must still
Leave my soul's debt uncancelled. All that's best
In me, and in my art, is thine:—Me-seems,
Even now, we walk afield. Through good and ill,
My sorrowing heart forgets not, and in dreams
I see thee, in the sun-lands of the blest.
Frankfort, Kentucky, October 6, 1887.
WHEN EVENING COMETH ON
[From the same]