Active and nervous was his gait; his limbs,
And his whole figure, breathed intelligence.”
Mr. Lathrop was born in Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, August 25, 1851. It was a fit place for a poet’s birthplace, “those gardens in perfect bloom, girded about with creaming waves.” He came of Puritan stock, the founder of his family being the Rev. John Lathrop, a Separatist minister, who came to Massachusetts in 1634. Some of his kinsmen have borne a noble part in the creation of an American literature, notably the historian of the Dutch and the genial autocrat, Wendell Holmes. His primary education was had in the public schools of New York; from thence he went to Dresden, Germany, returning in 1870 to study law at Columbia College. Law was little to his liking. The dry and musty tomes, wherein is written some truth and not a little error, sanctioned by one generation of wiseacres to be whittled past recognition by another generation of the same species, could hardly hope to hold in thraldom a mind that had from boyhood browsed in the royal demesne of literature. Law and literature, despite the smart sayings of a few will not run in the same rut. In abandoning law for literature, he but followed the law of his being. What law lost literature gained. On a trip abroad a year later he met Rose Hawthorne, the second daughter of the great Nathaniel, wooed, and won her. This marriage was by far the happiest event in his life, the crowning glory of his manhood, a fountain of bliss to sustain his after life. Years later, in a little poem entitled, “Love that Lives,” referring to the woman that was his all, he addresses her in words that needed no coaxing by the muses, but had long been distilled by his heart, ready for his pen to give them a setting and larger life.
“Dear face—bright, glinting hair—
Dear life, whose heart is mine—
The thought of you is prayer,
In starlight, or in rain;
In the sunset’s shrouded glow;
Ever, with joy or pain,