To sleep in icy graves.”
Such felicities were not uncommon with him. He was the friend and helpful critic of all the younger Indiana writers, and literary reputations have been created from slighter talents than his. His poems were collected privately, under the title “Club Moss” (1890).
So far nearly every name identified with the literary impulse in Indiana has been met south of a line drawn across the State at Crawfordsville; but Evaleen Stein carried it farther north, to Lafayette. Miss Stein’s verse illustrates happily the growing emancipation of the younger generation of Western poets from bare didacticism, and an escape from the landscape of tradition. She finds her subjects in nature, and draws pictures for the pleasure of it, and not with the expectation of tacking a moral to the frame. Earnestness and conviction characterize her verses, and there is often a kind of exultance in the note when she sings of the rough hill pastures or the marshes and bayous that invite her study. She has something of Thoreau’s genius for details, and her volume “One Way to the Woods” (1897) is an accurate calendar of the moods of nature. Her work marks really a new generation, the change of fashion, and the passing of the ante-bellum poets of the region. Twenty years earlier no Ohio Valley poet would have explored a bayou, or could have written of it so musically as Miss Stein:—
“Ah, surely none would ever guess
That through that tangled wilderness,
Through those far forest depths remote,
Lay any smallest path, much less
A way wherein to guide a boat!”
A small volume of the poems of M. Genevieve Todd (1863-1896), of the order of Sisters of Providence, was published after her death. They are wholly devotional, and are marked by elevation of spirit wedded to correct taste. Sister Mary Genevieve was born at Vevay, of Protestant parents, and died at the convent of St. Mary’s of the Woods near Terre Haute. Albion Fellows Bacon, Mrs. D. M. Jordan, Richard Lew Dawson, and William R. Williams have also been creditable contributors to the Hoosier anthology.
Indiana offers, on the whole, a fair field for poets. The prevailing note of the landscape is tranquillity. There is hardly a spot in the State that touches the imagination with a sense of power or grandeur, and yet there are countless scenes of quiet beauty. The Wabash gathers breadth and grace as it flows southward. Long curves here and there give to the eye the illusion of a chain of lakes, and the river’s valley is a rich garden. The Tippecanoe is another beautiful river, famous among fishermen, and there are a number of charming lakes in the northern part of the State. The Kankakee marsh was long haunted by the migrant wild birds, and in recent years a wild goose was found there with the piece of an Eskimo arrow, made of reindeer bone, through its breast. Poets and novelists have found inspiration in the Kankakee. Maurice Thompson and Evaleen Stein have celebrated the region in song; and there is a tradition that the manuscript of “Ben Hur” visited both the Kankakee and Lake Maxinkuckee at certain crises in its preparation. The possibilities of mixed forests are nowhere more happily illustrated than in Indiana, whether in the earliest wistful days of spring or in the full glory of autumn. The beech and the elm, the maple, the hickory and the walnut, and the humbler sassafras and pawpaw are companions of a royal order of forestry, from which the sycamore—the self-constituted guardian of rivers and creeks—is excluded by nature’s decree confirmed by man’s preference. The variety of cereals that may be grown saves the tilled areas from monotony. There are no vast plains of corn or wheat as in Kansas or the Dakotas, but the corn ripens between wheat stubble on one hand, and green pastures or remnants of woodland on the other. The transitional seasons bring more of delight to the senses than the full measure of winter and summer, and have for the observer constant novelty and change. There are qualities in the spring of the Ohio Valley—qualities of sweetness and wistfulness that are peculiar to the region; and when the winds are all from the south, and the winter wheat is brilliant in the fields; when the sap sings beneath the rough bark of the old forest trees, and the young orchards are a blur of pink and white, spirits are abroad there with messages for the sons of men.