Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 15.djvu/293

 members of the craft generally, our poet laureate was too poor to bear the expense himself, and if he had any zealous friends among the book folk or moneyed people, they didn't exhibit a great deal of expedition in showing up. This was perhaps largely due to the fact that, while he could write the best of verse, he was not well versed in thrifty business methods.

Thirty-five years have come and gone since that hopeful volume was ready to launch upon an expectant public, and the author has long since ceased to be actuated either by hope or by fear as to the result. Will not the people of Oregon, precedent to their erection of his monument in stone, pay him the more useful homage of preserving his delightful lyrics in book form? Most of his poems had to do with the grandeur and beauty of the state, for Simpson was especially and almost exclusively an Oregon bard. His themes were always well chosen, and his treatment always moral and elevating in its tendency. For the impress of a pious mother's training was something he could not thoroughly shake off, however else he might go astray personally. Mere appeals to the sensual side of human nature are hard to find in any of his leading poems, and this was not accidental, either. He met completely that excellent definition of poetry which says it consists of "good thoughts happily expressed in faultless rhyme and meter." Some people call "Beautiful Willamette" his best effusion, but with me, there are many of them that are the best. When I read that exquisite story, told in charming verse, about the young maid who thought "Love will surely come tomorrow," I think it as pretty as anything that could be put down in words on paper. And when I read its companion piece, "Forever," that touches to the quick his own life's melancholy history, another sort of feeling comes over me, and I am awed by the thrilling grandeur of his own lamentations. Hear him: