Joy! joy! all over joy!
JAMES MAURICE THOMPSON.
POET AND SCIENTIST.
URING the past forty years Indiana has been prolific in producing prominent men. General Lew Wallace, James Whitcomb Riley, Joaquin Miller and Maurice Thompson are among the prominent men of letters who are natives of the “Hoosier State.”
Maurice Thompson is claimed as belonging to both the North and South, and his record, perhaps, justifies this double claim. He was born at Fairfield, Indiana, September 9th, 1844, but his parents removed to Kentucky during his childhood and subsequently to Northern Georgia. He grew up in the latter state, and was so thoroughly Southern in sentiment that he enlisted and fought in the Confederate Army. At the end of the war, however, he returned to Indiana, where he engaged with a Railway Surveying Party in which he proved himself so efficient that he was raised from a subordinate to the head position in that work, which he followed for some years. After a course of study in law, he began his practice in Crawfordsville, Indiana, the same town in which General Lew Wallace lived. It was from this section that he was elected to the legislature in 1879.
Maurice Thompson is not only a man of letters, but is a scientist of considerable ability. In 1885, he was appointed chief of the State Geological Survey. He was also a Naturalist devoting much attention to ornithology. Many of his poems and most delightful prose sketches are descriptive of bird life.
Mr. Thompson has traveled much in the United States, and his writings in various periodicals as well as his books have attracted wide attention for their original observation and extensive information while they are excelled by few modern writers for poetic richness and diction.