And then I heard triumphal song,
’Tis morning and the days are long.”
Mr. Parker felt, more than any other poet of the Ohio Valley, the grandeur of the vast woodlands as the pioneers found them, and he has touched upon it constantly in his writings. He lived for several years in Canada, as a consular officer, and wrote a series of poems under Northern influences; but he has been most fortunate in subjects derived from home experiences. He is a connecting link between the earliest Indiana writers and their successors, and he has been one of the humblest and most devoted and sincere of all the servants of literature in his State.
II. Forceythe Willson
It is an abrupt transition from these pioneers of poesy to Forceythe Willson, the only Indiana poet who ever came in contact with the New England group. Emerson, in the preface to his “Parnassus” (1874), says, “I have inserted only one of the remarkable poems of Forceythe Willson, a young Wisconsin poet of extraordinary promise, who died very soon after this was written.” The poem chosen was “In State.” This placing of Willson in Wisconsin is, as Piatt says in his eloquent sketch of the poet,[46] rather needless, for he was never connected with Wisconsin in any way. He was born at Genesee Falls, New York, April 10, 1837. In 1846 his father removed to Kentucky, and in 1852 to New Albany. Willson spent about a year at Antioch College, in Ohio, and went afterward to Harvard, but left in his sophomore year, owing to ill health. His home was in Indiana from 1852 to 1864. He wrote his best poems, indeed the greater part of his slender product, at New Albany, and his residence there, in immediate contact with the seat of war, colored his distinctive work. He married, in 1863, Elizabeth Conwell Smith, whom he had met the preceding year at New Albany, and whose literary gifts created a bond of sympathy between them. They removed shortly to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where one of Willson’s brothers was in school. He purchased a house on the Mount Auburn road, near Lowell’s home, with an outlook on the Charles River. James R. Gilmore (Edmund Kirke) was his neighbor and saw much of him at Cambridge. He wrote, in 1895, his recollections, testifying to Willson’s unusual qualities, and giving this description of his personal appearance:—
“Take him, all in all, he was the most lovable man I ever knew; and as a mere specimen of physical manhood he was a joy to look at. A little above the medium height, he was perfectly proportioned and of a sinewy, symmetrical figure. His hair was raven black, wavy, and glossy as satin. His skin was alight olive, slightly tinged with red, and his features were regular, somewhat prominent, and exceedingly flexible, showing an organization of a highly sensitive character. But his eyes were what riveted the observer’s attention. Mr. Longfellow told me they were the finest type of the Oriental, but I never saw eyes—Eastern or Western—to compare with them in luminous power. They were full, large, and dark, with overhanging lashes; but for the life of me I cannot tell their precise color. At times they seemed a deep blue, at other times an intense black, and then they were balls of fire, as he was stirred by some strong emotion. They spoke the ready language of a deep, strong, fiery, yet chastened, nature as it was moved by love, joy, sorrow or indignation.”[47]
Piatt remarks upon his “Oriental look and manner,” and all who knew him were impressed by his distinguished appearance and grave courtesy. In 1858 New Albany became interested in spiritualism. Willson fell under the spell and began a study of the subject. Piatt says that Willson “soon abandoned the professors, but retained until his death a serious spiritual theory or faith of his own. He believed—and he was absolutely honest and sincere, I am sure, in his faith—that the spirits of the dead could, and at times do, have communication with the living.”
Willson seems not to have had an active occupation at any time. His father had been successful in business, and dying at New Albany in 1859, left a comfortable fortune to his children. The poet lived by himself for a number of years, at New Albany, in a small house where he surrounded himself with books and led the life of a student. Louisville is directly across the Ohio from New Albany, and Willson was known to a few of the literary people on the Kentucky side, particularly to Prentice. The approach of the Civil War aroused in him a deep interest in its great issues, and he wrote editorials in support of the Union cause for Prentice’s Journal. He began in the first year of the war, and concluded later, his poem “In State,” which, in spite of its occasional vagueness and its despairing view of the political situation, is written in an effective stanza and is splendidly imaginative. He gloomily assumed that the nation was dead—hence his personification of it as a prone figure lying “in state,” and he brings the rulers of Europe to look upon it,—
“The winds have tied the drifted snow
Around the face and chin; and lo,