Tag Archives: Roger W. Smith

Increase Mather, “Sermon Occasioned by the Execution of a Man Found Guilty of Murder”

 

Increase Mather, ‘Sermon Occasioned by an Execution’

Increase Mather

Sermon Occasioned by the Execution of a Man Found Guilty of Murder

Preached at Boston in New-England, March 11th 1685/6 (Together with the confession. Last Expressions. and Solemn Warning of that Murderer, to all Persons; especially to Young Men, to beware of those Sins which brought him to his Miserable End.)

— posted by Roger W. Smith

    March 2023

“At least I had them in my life.”

 

Thanks in old age—thanks ere I go,
For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air—for life, mere
life,
For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear
—you, father—you, brothers, sisters, friends,)
For all my days—not those of peace alone—the days of war the
same,
For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands,
For shelter, wine and meat—for sweet appreciation,
(You distant, dim unknown—or young or old—countless, unspecified, readers belov’d,
We never met, and ne’er shall meet—and yet our souls embrace,
long, close and long;)
For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books—for colors, forms,
For all the brave strong men—devoted, hardy men—who’ve forward sprung in freedom’s help, all years, all lands,
For braver, stronger, more devoted men—(a special laurel ere I
go, to life’s war’s chosen ones,
The cannoneers of song and thought—the great artillerists—the
foremost leaders, captains of the soul:)
As soldier from an ended war return’d—As traveler out of
myriads, to the long procession retrospective,
Thanks—joyful thanks!—a soldier’s, traveler’s thanks.

— Walt Whitman

 

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Thanks (writes the poet) for precious ever-lingering memories

of parents, family, friends

they make life precious.

And, from an exchange I had with a friend from the past yesterday:

ME

How many siblings were there including you? [Our parents were close. We were from different towns and didn’t know one another well.]

MY FRIEND

I’m #2 of 7

J—- #1 and S—- #3 are dead.

ME

very sad

about your brothers

MY FRIEND

Yes. But at least I had them in my life! …

Not sure if I’d be able to get out of bed if I thought it was a anything but a blessing to have had them, however briefly.

 

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Her words struck me. It may seem obvious. But my friend, their sister, puts it so well. I can hear Walt Whitman saying the same thing.

We mourn the dead. We were blessed to have had them. (I think of my parents, and so many others.)

Yes, existence in the here and now matters. But just as our life, everyone’s, our existence, is a miracle — people on earth — so was the existence of those no longer living: that they did live; and, in the case of our loved ones and friends, were part of our existence.

 

— Roger W. Smith

  February 27, 2023

“The Last Moments of John Brown”

 

James Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, with an Auto-Biography of His Childhood and Youth (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), pp. 396-397

The Victory Over Death’

 

Thomas Hovenden, The Last Moments of John Brown

 

posted by Roger W. Smith

   February 2023

“He had been many things. … Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly wasted his time.”

 

Thirty years of taking-in; fifteen years of giving out; —that, in brief, is Oliver Goldsmith’s story. When, in 1758, his failure to pass at Surgeons’ Hall finally threw him on letters for a living, the thirty years were finished, and the fifteen years had been begun. What was to come he knew not; but, from his bare-walled lodging in Green-Arbour-Court, he could at least look back upon a sufficiently diversified past. He had been an idle, orchard-robbing schoolboy; a tuneful but intractable sizar of Trinity; a lounging, loitering, fair-haunting, flute-playing Irish “buckeen.” He had tried both Law and Divinity, and crossed the threshold of neither. He had started for London and stopped at Dublin; he had set out for America and arrived at Cork. He had been many things :—a medical student, a strolling musician, a corrector of the press, an apothecary, an usher at a Peckham “academy.” Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly wasted his time. And yet, as things fell out, it is doubtful whether his parti-coloured experiences were not of more service to him than any he could have obtained if his progress had been less erratic. Had he fulfilled the modest expectations of his family, he would probably have remained a simple curate in Westmeath, eking out his ” forty pounds a year” by farming a field or two, migrating contentedly at the fitting season from the “blue bed to the brown,” and (it may be) subsisting vaguely as a local poet upon the tradition of some youthful couplets to a pretty cousin, who had married a richer man. As it was, if he could not be said “to have seen life steadily, and seen it whole,” he had, at all events, inspected it pretty narrowly in parts; and, at a time when he was most impressible, had preserved the impress of many things which, in his turn, he was to impress upon his writings. “No man “—says one of his biographers”*—ever put so much of himself into his books as Goldsmith.” To his last hour he was ·drawing upon the thoughts and reviving the memories of that “unhallowed time” when, to all appearance, he was hopelessly squandering his opportunities. To do as Goldsmith did, would scarcely enable a man to write a Vicar of Wakefield or a Deserted Village,—certainly his practice cannot be preached with safety “to those that eddy round and round.” But viewing his entire career, it is difficult not to see how one part seems to have been an indispensable preparation for the other, and to marvel once more (with the philosopher Square) at “the eternal Fitness of Things.”**

— Austin Dobson, Introduction, Poems and Plays By Oliver Goldsmith (Everyman’s Library, 1910)

 

*John Forster, author of The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith.

**A quotation from a fictional character, the philosopher Square, who is parodied in Fielding’s novel Tom Jones.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   February 2023

Staten Island beach walks

 

Sea-cabbage; salt hay; sea-rushes; ooze–sea-ooze; gluten–sea-gluten; sea­-scum; spawn; surf; beach; salt-perfume; mud; sound of walking barefoot ankle in the edge of the water by the sea. — Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Volume IV: Notes, edited by Edward F. Grier (New York University Press 1984), pg. 1309

 

photographs by Roger W. Smith

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   February 2023

Walt Whitman, “Brooklyn Parks”

 

Walt Whitman, ‘Brooklyn Parks’

Posted here (Word document above):

Walt Whitman. “BROOKLYN PARKS”

Brooklyn Daily Times, April 17, 1858

What intrigues me is Whitman’s mention of “a Park on the heights, over Montague ferry!,” whereby he refers to the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, from which there is a splendid view of Manhattan.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   January 2023

 

Brooklyn Heights; photo by Roger W. Smith

Brooklyn Heights; photo by Roger W. Smith

 

Walt Whitman, “Philosophy of Ferries”

 

Walt Whitman, ‘Philosophy of Ferries’

Posted here (Word document above):

Walt Whitman “Philosophy of Ferries,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 11, 1947

IN The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman; Much of Which Has Been But Recently Discovered, with Various Early Manuscripts; Now First Published; Collected and Edited by Emory Holloway, Volume One, pp. 168-171 (Gloucester, Mass. Peter Smith, 1972)

 

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Things haven’t changed much since Whitman’s day.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   January 2023

 

photo by Roger W. Smith

 

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See also my post

the ferry

the ferry

Walt Whitman, “Broadway”

 

Walt Whitman, ‘Broadway’ (2)

Posted here (Word document above):

Wat Whitman, “BROADWAY”

Life Illustrated, August 9, 1856

an unsigned article attributed to Whitman, reprinted in

New York Dissected By Walt Whitman: A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of LEAVES OF GRASS; Introduction and Notes by Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, Inc. 1936), pp. 119-124

 

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Whitman’s experiences and impressions in his pre-Civil War years are similar to my own in Manhattan jaunts. (I also love to take the ferry.) As noted by Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari:

When Moncure D. Conway, at Emerson’s suggestion, called upon Whitman a month or so after the appearance of Leaves of Grass, in 1855, he took a walk with him through the city. “Nothing could surpass,” he says, “the blending of insouciance with active observation in his manner as we strolled along the streets”. … Whitman had been walking the streets, riding the omnibuses and crossing the ferries for many years. His memory was stored with so many such impressions that one of his early manuscripts describes his mind as a picture gallery. Perhaps it was from a desire to reconcile the contradictions in these multiform and inharmonious impressions that the poet sought escape in mystical rhapsody. The peculiar quality of Whitman’s elevated poetic mood, however, is due to the fact that instead of withdrawing his mind ascetically from experience, he sought rather to use definite concrete experiences to climb to a summit of vision which would embrace them all.

— posted by Roger W. Smith

January 2022