Those families, you know, are our upper-crust,—not upper ten thousand.
“The Ways of the Hour,” Chap. VI,—Cooper.
James Fenimore Cooper, a famous American novelist, and historian, was born in Burlington, N. J., September 15, 1789, and died at Cooperstown, N. Y., September 14, 1851. A few of his celebrated novels are: “The Spy,” “The Pilot,” “Precaution,” “The Pioneers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Prairie,” “The Red Rover,” “The Water-Witch,” “Homeward Bound,” “The Pathfinder,” “The Deerslayer,” “The Redskins,” “The Ways of the Hour,” etc.
I would not live alway: I ask not to stay
Where storm after storm rises dark o’er the way.
“I would not live alway,”—William Augustus Muhlenberg.
William Augustus Muhlenberg, a noted American philanthropist and Protestant Episcopal clergyman, was born in Philadelphia, Penn., September 16, 1796, and died in New York, April, 1877. He wrote: “A Plea for Christian Hymns,” and many well-known hymns, among them: “Saviour Who Thy Flock Art Feeding,” “Shout the Glad Tidings,” and “I Would Not Live Alway.”
We all know Mr. Lowell’s brilliant qualities as a poet, critic, scholar, and man of the world; but that in him which touches me most strongly belongs to his relations to his country—his keen and subtle yet kindly recognition of her virtues and her faults, and the sympathetic power with which in the day of her melancholy triumph, after the Civil War, he gave such noble expression to her self-devotion, sorrows, and hopes.
“James Russell Lowell, The Critic,”—Francis Parkman.
Francis Parkman, an eminent American historian, was born at Boston, September 16, 1823, and died at Jamaica Plain, Mass., November 8, 1893. He wrote: “The Oregon Trail: Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life,” “History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac,” “The Pioneers of France in the New World,” “The Jesuits in North America,” “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West,” “The Old Régime in Canada,” “Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV,” “Montcalm and Wolfe,” and “A Half-Century of Conflict.”
The essayist rises higher than the poet—witty, tender; wise in human frailty, but never bitter.