Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/707



There are three literary Lampmans, well known in Oregon—Ben Hur, Rex and Herbert Sheldon. Ben Hur Lampman, poet whether he writes prose or verse, is brother to Rex, a popular columnist in Oregon several years ago, and is father to Herbert Sheldon, considered as a naturalist in the chapter on descriptive writers. All three, the son then aetat 5, made their first headquarters in Oregon at Gold Hill, in 1912, where Ben Hur Lampman published and edited the Gold Hill News and fished in the Rogue River for four years. In 1916 he came to Portland to join the news staff of the Oregonian. For several years he has been an editorial writer on that newspaper. He was born in Barron, Wisconsin, on August 12, 1886. He moved to North Dakota and, at the age of 19, established and began editing the Arena at Michigan City. The next year he married Lena McEwen Sheldon, who had come from New York to North Da kota to teach school. To her in 1926 he dedicated How Could I Be Forgetting?—“To Lena who is very patient with me, but holds that the kitchen is not the place to clean fish. ” In addition to this book of poems and editorial articles, he is the author of The Tramp Printer, a collection of prose sketches, 1934, and Here Comes Some body, a novel, 1935.

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From How Could I Be Forgetting?, 1926, 1933

Up sprang the mallard from the green and golden sedges, The broider and the baldrick of a lone, lone land, To wheel above his marshes—where the shy brood fledges— When all the pretty plover folk were calling from the sand. I would you could have seen him, with the sun-glint on his winging, When morning smiled and woke the world a dozen years agone— And set the redwing blackbird braves to singing, singing, Singing A silver stave of happiness in welcome to the dawn. A breeze from over yonder walked among the lusty rushes, The green and golden garments of a lone, lone lake,