Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/526

 FRANCES FULLER BARRITT.

was born at Rome, New York, in May, 1826. When she was four years old her parents removed to the "pinery" of northern Pennsylvania, and there, for several years, she enjoyed nature in its most notable moods, receiving impressions which, at a later day, coined themselves into expression. In 1839 the family removed to Wooster, Ohio, where, under the influences of good schools and good social relations, Frances developed rapidly. To such a nature as hers, authorship is a necessity; hence we are not surprised to learn that, at the age of fourteen, she became an acceptable contributor to the press. Besides poems to the local papers, she wrote a story "Seventy Times Seven" for the Philadelphia Saturday Courier—then a highly popular journal of light literature—all of which, for a girl of fourteen, proved her mind to be one of no ordinary character. She had for a companion, besides her sister Metta, a girl of singular endowments of mind, Emeline H. Brown, who, in her brief life, made her mark as a poet. Together, these three read and talked and wrote; and out of their young dreams came the resolves which both Frances and Metta have since so entirely fulfilled, namely, to make a name and fame for themselves.

Frances early became a contributor to the leading journals of belle-lettre literature in this country. In 1848 she especially succeeded in arresting attention through the columns of the New York Home Journal, whose editors, N. P. Willis and G. P. Morris, did not hesitate to give her a foremost position among current female authors. "The Post-Boy's Song," "Revolution," "Kate," "The Old Man's Favorite," "Keats," "The Deserted City," "The Country Road," "The Midnight Banner," "Vision of the Poor," "Song of the Age," were poems which served to arrest the attention of the press of England as well as of America. Edgar A. Poe, in his somewhat noted paper on Mr. Griswold's volume of "Female Poets," took occasion to refer to Miss Fuller as among the "most imaginative" of our lady poets. The poems above named are characterized by a power of diction and individuality in conception which give them the force of imaginative creations; but we are disposed to think her genius is not representatively "imaginative" according to Poe's definition of that word. She has that self-reliant spirit and clearness of perception which betray power and practicality—if we may be permitted the use of such a word in speaking of true poetry; hence, her poems, full of fine imagery and originality of conception as they are, still are marked with the correctness of the real rather than with the indefinitiveness of the ideal. This applies more particularly to the productions of her earlier years—to those named above; her poems of later years have grown more introspective, show a more intense love of nature in her quiet moods, and may, perhaps, be regarded as more imaginative than her compositions previous to 1854.

Miss Fuller's first volume was given to the public in 1851, under the editorial super-