Page:The Poetical Works of Jonathan E. Hoag.djvu/16

 he looked; and watched the calm agrestic years roll by, with the life of the old farm home, and the little school, and the academy, and the general training on the green. He knew, and what is more, he felt, the old America of our fathers; and was in addition a worshipper of those universal powers of grandeur and loveliness which gleam in the woods, hills, valleys, streams and waterfalls of untenanted Nature. Add to this a keenly active, humorous and analytical mind, and a disposition of the warmest kindness, tolerance, and sympathy; and you have a picture of the fundamentals on which our poet's art is built.

The titanic background of the past, so pitifully lost to our younger generation, was possessed in all its potency by the growing bard. The Hoags are a long-lived race, and when little Jonathan was six he could sit at the feet of his great-aunt Lydia, who lived to be 103, and hear at first hand the reminiscences of one who had witnessed not only the Revolution, but the last of the French and Indian wars as well. He learned from the very first that essential continuity of life and thought which our moderns learn too late or not at all; and never swerved from conservatism and sanity as he grew to the six feet of sturdy Hoag, Wing, Allen and Gifford brawn which he has today.

Of books Mr. Hoag was ever an avid reader. Though educated only at the "little red schoolhouse" and the Washington County Academy, he lost no opportunity to enlarge his liberal culture; so that ere long he was master of a wide erudition and discriminating philosophy. Uniting to his studiousness an acute observation of men and scenes, he gradually became stored with an accumulation of ideas and images which in one of his eloquent temperament could not but seek expression in literature. By degrees we find him uttering his thoughts and impressions in essays and poems; though moved somewhat to restraint because of the absence of early technical training in the most rigid literary forms. Of this earlier work very little verse has survived; though from the single specimen here presented we see that its natural merit was indeed great.

Mr. Hoag, maturing, acquired experience, family responsibilities, and varied interests. Poet and dreamer already, he became likewise skilled in law, newspaper correspondence, observant travel, and the several sciences. He developed social and political interests, visited the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, and rose to a position of commanding influence in the Prohibition party; for his sensitive good taste had always rebelled against the bestial spectacle of drunkenness and its attendant miseries. His letters, signed "Scriba," were always in demand by the press; whether touching on the beauties of some natural vista or historic spot, on some unusual observation pertaining to geology, geography, or meteorology, or on some problem of governmental or economic significance. In 1904, at an age already ripe, Mr.