Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/71

 MICAH P. FLINT. MiCAH P. Flint, son of Timothy Flint, who rendered eminent service in the cul- tivation and encouragement of literature in the Mississippi valley, was born in Lu- re nberg, Massachusetts, about the year 1807. While Micah was yet a boy, his father selected the west as a field for missionary labor, and the young poet received his education, with his father for tutor, at St. Louis, New Madrid, New Orleans, and Alexandria, Mississippi, to which pkces Rev. Mr. Flint's engagements as a missionary successively called him. When failing health finally requii-ed his father to suspend his labors as a minister, Micah studied law and was admitted to the bar at Alexandria, but was not permitted to become known as a lawyer. His first published poem was on a mound that stood near a farm-house in Cahokia prairie, Illinois, to which for a few months, when his health required a respite from severe labors, his father took the family. It was written in 1825, and was printed in Timothy Flint's " Ten Years in the Mississippi Valley." In the same work are several other poems by Micah, which have merit enough to justify the evident pride his father took in them. In 1826, " The Hunter, and other Poems," a thin duodecimo volume, was published in Boston. " The Hunter " is a narrative of the adventures of a backwoodsman, who, on account of Indian outrages, had become a Hermit. It is not vigorously executed, but contains a few pictures which may now be deemed interesting. In a dedication to Josiah S. Johnston, United States Senator from Louisiana, the author said of it : Neither leisure nor the shade and the books of academic establishments, nor the excitement of literary societies, had any share in" eliciting it. It was produced in the intervals of the severest studies, and where swamps, alligators, miasm, muskotoes, and the growing of cotton, might seem to preclude the slightest effort of the muse ; and where the ordinary motive to action is with one hand to fence with death and with the other to grasp at the rapid accumulation of wealth. In a poem written two years later, the following stanzas occur : I was permitted, in my youthful folly. To write, and send a book forth, once myself; And now it makes me feel right melancholy. When e'er by chance I see it on a shelf: Not that I think the book was common trash. But, that it cost some hundred dollars cash. In 1827, Timothy Flint started, at Cincinnati, The Western Beview, a monthly magazine of much value, which was continued three years. Micah was a frequent contributor. In an article written at the close of the first volume, his father said : The poetry, except two articles, has been altogether original, and of domestic fabric. That the public begin rightly to estimate the powers of the chief contributor in this department, we have the most grateful and consoling testimonials. Every one remarks, and most truly, that editors ought to have good steel ivire instead of nerves. But we do not see the cruel necessity that an (55)