Page:The Poetical Works of Jonathan E. Hoag.djvu/15

 ENNED in this age of chaos and change, fever and flourish, by a man born when Andrew Jackson was President, when Poe was an unknown youth with his second thin volume of verses in the press, when Coleridge, Moore, Crabbe, Southey, and Wordsworth were living bards, and when the memory of Byron, Shelley, Blake and Keats was still recent; the present collection of poems is probably unique in its defiance of time and whim. Where else, indeed, would one be likely to find such a body of poetry; written almost wholly after the author's eighty-fifth year, and with many of the choicest specimens dating from beyond his ninetieth year, yet exhibiting an uniform grace, vigour, and vividness which place it in competition with the best, irrespective of origin?

Our venerable author, Jonathan E. Hoag, was born February 10, 1831, in a farmhouse at Valley Falls, Rensselaer County, New York. Heredity gave him her best; for in his blood are mingled the Quaker strain of the Hoags, the sturdiness of the Wings, the rugged independence of Ethan Allen, and the high martial spirit of the Giffords, through whom he traces his descent from the Norman Walter Gifford, first Earl of Buckingham, who was standard-bearer to William the Conqueror. The earliest environment of Mr. Hoag, which he has celebrated in so many delightful poems and essays, was an idyllic kind of rural life which has today largely vanished through the incursions of the railway, telephone, and postal system; and which was marked by that lofty and picturesque simplicity formed when a race of fine stock and traditions reverts to the stalwart condition of the pioneer. In such a life there was, despite the proportion of arduous toil, a certain beauty and freshness that sprang from the continuous isolation with varied nature, and from the acutely visible cycle of fundamental acts and processes—ploughing, sowing, cultivating, reaping, storing; stock-raising, shearing, spinning, weaving; baking, sewing, candle-making—all the simple, homely little deeds which modernity has banished from most individual lives through co-operative effort, yet which the most sophisticated writers like to recall in occasional idyls and delicately etched eclogues. Thousands knew this elder and vanished America, but being bound to the practical, did not feel its loveliness poignantly enough to need to express it in the rhythms and images of poetry. Mr. Hoag, however, was endowed with the true vision and divine sensitiveness of the bard; and vibrated sympathetically to the pastoral scenes around him. Alive to beauty in every form, he found it