Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/348



is the youngest of a family of nine children. His father was one of the adventurous pioneers who early made the "Western country their home. He migrated to Marietta in 1789. After residing on the Muskingum river until 1802, he removed to Fairfield county, Ohio, where Horace P. was born, about the year 1818. He received a good common school education, to which he afterward added a knowledge of the Latin, French and German languages. He read law with Hocking H. Hunter, of Lancaster, and was admitted to the bar by the Supreme Court of Ohio, at Cincinnati, in April, 1839. In October of the same year he settled in Logansport, Indiana, where he has since resided.

Mr. Biddle has made several excellent translations from French and German poets. His version of Lamartine's beautiful poem, "The Swallow," was copied in many leading journals. At an early age he commenced writing rhymes. One of his pieces, printed when he was fifteen years old, contained merit enough to induce another poet to claim it as his own. In 1842 he became a contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger. Since that time he has furnished occasional articles, prose as well as poetical, to the Ladies' Repository, Cincinnati, and to other literary periodicals. A collection of his poems was published in a pamphlet form, in 1850, under the title "A Few Poems." Two years later a second edition appeared. It attracted the attention of Washington Irving, who, in a letter to the author, said, "I have read your poems with great relish: they are full of sensibility and beauty, and bespeak a talent well worthy of cultivation. Such blossoms should produce fine fruit." In 1858, an enlarged edition was published at Cincinnati, with an essay entitled "What is Poetry?" The author elaborately discusses the definitions that have been given by eminent thinkers, and then decides that "poetry is beautiful thought, expressed in appropriate language—having no reference to the useful."

An active and prosperous professional life has not prevented Mr. Biddle from being drawn into the political arena. On the nomination of Henry Clay for the presidency, he advocated his election, and was placed upon the electoral ticket. In 1845 he became a candidate for the Legislature, but was defeated. He was elected Presiding Judge of the Eighth Judicial Circuit Court in December, 1846, in which office he continued until 1852. He was a member of the Indiana Constitutional Convention, which assembled in 1850. Although the district was against his party, he received a majority of over two hundred votes. In 1852 he was nominated for Congress, but failed to receive the election. He was elected Supreme Judge in 1857, by a large majority, but the Governor, Ashbel P. Willard, refused to commission him, for the reason that no vacancy in the office existed. The Republican party again, in 1858,