Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/485

 MARY E. FEE SHANNON. Mary Eulalie Fee was a descendant, on her father's side, from the family to which John Philpot Curran belonged, and, on her mother's side, from the Pilgrim pioneers of Plymouth, Elizabeth Dutton Carver, her mother, belonging to the seventh generation in a direct hne from John Carver, who came to America in the Mayflower. Her parents were married at Marietta, Ohio, on the twenty-sixth of October, 1817. She was their third child, and was born at Flemingsburg, Kentucky, on the ninth day of February, 1824. Her father died when she was eleven years old. The family then resided in Clermont county, Ohio. Her mother, a woman of uncommon energy of character, being left in destitute circumstances, was obliged to provide for, and edu- cate her family, until her two sons had attained strength and experience which ena- bled them to afford her assistance ; yet Mary E. was well instructed, not only in the branches of learning ordinary for young ladies, but was given the best opportunities for musical culture which Cincinnati afforded — opportunities which she practically im- proved. "When quite a young girl she wrote verses which highly pleased her friends, and was afterward an acceptable contributor to The Columbian and Great West, to the Cincinnati Daily Times, Arthur's Home Magazine, and other periodicals. She wrote with great ease, and was very reluctant to revise. Miss Fee was married at New Richmond, Ohio, on the thirty-first day of January, 1854, to John Shannon, then editor of a newspaper at Auburn, California. In the month following she accompanied her husband to his home, promising herself lit- erary, as well as other usefulness, on the shores of the Pacific ; but her health, which had never been robust, declined rapidly, and she died on the twenty-sixth day of De- cember, 1855. Among the papers, returned from California to her friends in Cin- cinnati, was a poem in which a painful foreboding that she would never tread her native land again, was sorrowfully expressed : There's a storied vale romantic Beyond the wide Atlantic, Where the red June rose is blushing 'Neath the melody outgushing From each embowering grove. Shall my feet again be roaming, In the evening's pleasajit gloaming, Where they were wont to rove ? The fitful winds are sighing o'er and o'er. And my heart-chords low replying, nevermore. In August, 1854, Moore, Wilstach, Keys & Co., Cincinnati, published her poems in a neat duodecimo of one hundred and ninety-four pages. It was entitled, " Buds, Blossoms, and Leaves." (469)