Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/104



was born March twenty-six, 1804, on a farm which has since given place to the village of Greenfield, Highland county, Ohio. His father, James Curry, was a man of great bravery and patriotism. In his youth he was, with some Virginia troops, in a bloody engagement near the mouth of the Kanawha, on which occasion he was severely wounded. During the greater part of the Revolutionary War, he was an officer of the Virginia Continental Line; he was at the battles of Germantown and Monmouth, and was taken prisoner when the American army, under General Lincoln, surrendered to the British at Charleston, South Carolina. For fourteen months subsequently, he was on parole two miles distant from that city.

He must have been one of the earliest pioneers of Ohio. In 1811 he removed from Highland county, and settled on Darby Creek, near the village of Pleasant Valley, m the county of Union, where he held many important civil offices, the duties of which he faithfully discharged. He devoted liimself chiefly to agriculture, and he was doubtless a man of strong common sense, industrious habits, and honorable character. He died in 1834. The poet's mother was a lady of much mtelligence, tender sensibilities, and every social and domestic virtue.

Otway was a child of the wilderness—a situation not unsuitable to awaken imagination, to cultivate taste, and to call forth the love of nature and the spirit of poesy. The approach of the bear, the rattle of the snake, the whoop of the savage, were among the sources of his early fears. To observe the swallow build her nest in the barn, and to watch the deer bounding through the bushes, were among his early amusements; to mark when the dogwood blossoms, and when the north winds blow, to observe how nature mingles storm with sunshine, and draws the rainbow on the cloud, were among his first lessons in philosophy.

He probably learned his alphabet in the old family Bible, as he leaned against the jamb of the cabin fire-place. There was then no school law in Ohio; the schoolhouse was built by common consent, usually in the center of the clearings, and on an eminence, reminding one of Beattie's lines:

It was constructed of unhewn logs, floored with puncheons, and roofed with clapboards; having at one end a fire-place capable of receiving a twelve-foot back-log, and at the other a door, with a latch and string; it was completed by sawing out a log at each side, inserting in the opening a light frame, and stretching over this frame some foolscap paper well oiled; this served for the transmission of light, which fell with mellowed beams upon a sloping board, on which the copy-books of advanced scholars were to be placed. In the center of the room were benches without backs, made of slabs, by inserting upright sticks at their extremities.