Bibliography. The Courier-Journal (January 16, 1912); Scribner's Magazine (July; August, 1912).
SYCAMORES[9]
[From The Anteroom and Other Poems (Baltimore, 1911)]
They love no crowded forest dark,
They climb no mountains high,
But ranged along the pleasant vale
Where shining waters lie,
Their brown coats curling open show
A silvery undergleam,
Like the white limbs of laughing boys
Half ready for the stream.
What if they yield no harvests sweet,
Nor massive timbers sound,
And all their summer leafage casts
But scanty shade around;
Their slender boughs with zephyrs dance,
Their young leaves laugh in tune,
And there's no lad in all the land
Knows better when 'tis June.
They come from groves of Arcady,
Or some lost Land of Mirth,
That Work-a-day and Gain and Greed
May not possess the earth,
And though they neither toil nor spin,
Nor fruitful duties pay,
They also serve, mayhap, who help
The world keep holiday.
[ANDREW W. KELLEY]
Andrew W. Kelley ("Parmenas Mix"), poet preëminent of life on a country newspaper, was born in the state of New York about 1852. When twenty years of age he left Schenectady, New York, for Tennessee, but in 1873 he settled at Franklin, Kentucky, where he spent the remainder of his life. He was associate editor of Opie Read's paper, The Patriot, for some time, but when that sheet died, he drifted from pillar to post until a kindly death discovered him. The gossips of the quiet little town of Franklin will to-day tell the enquirer for facts regarding Kelley's life that he was engaged to a New York girl, all things were ready for the celebration of the ceremony, when the bride-to-be suddenly changed her mind, and poor Parmenas Mix was thus started in the drunkard's path. He planned to go East for several years prior to his death, to seek his literary fortunes, but he sat in his room and dreamed his life away. Kelley died at Franklin, Kentucky, in 1885. He was buried in the potter's field, a pauper and an outcast, which condition was wholly caused by excessive drinking. The very place of his grave can only be guessed at to-day. Kelley wrote many poems, nearly all of which celebrated some phase of life on a country newspaper, but his masterpiece is The Old Scissors' Soliloquy, which was originally published in Scribner's Monthly—now The Century Magazine—for April, 1876. It appeared in the "Bric-a-Brac Department," illustrated with a single tail-piece sketch of editorial scissors "lying at rest" upon newspaper clippings, with "a whopping big rat in the paste." Many of his other poems were also published in Scribner's. The New Doctor, Accepted and Will Appeal, and He Came to Pay, done in the manner of Bret Harte's The Aged Stranger, are exceedingly clever. A slender collection of his poems could be easily made, and should be. Opie Read wrote a tender tribute to the memory of his former friend, in which his merits were thus summed up: "The country has surely produced greater poets than 'Parmenas Mix,' but I doubt if we shall ever know a truer lover of Nature's divine impulses. He lightened the heart and made it tender, surely a noble mission; he talked to the lowly, he flashed the diamond of his genius into many a dark recess. He preached the gospel of good will; he sang a beautiful song."
Bibliography. Blades o' Blue Grass, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892); Poetry of American Wit and Humor, by R. L. Paget (Boston, 1899).