Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/146



Y great-grandfather, Matthias Pennypacker, had a reputation for vigorous and apt expression. Since his day the faculty has manifested itself in a number of his descendants. Judge Henry C. Conrad, of Wilmington, Delaware; Charles H. Pennypacker, the burgess of West Chester; Elijah F. Pennypacker, Canal Commissioner of Pennsylvania, with Thaddeus Stevens; Dr. Nathan A. Pennypacker, member of assembly in 1866, and my father, have shown the gift of speech in more than the ordinary measure. My brother, Isaac R. Pennypacker, who wrote the accepted life of General George G. Meade, has written poems which caught the attention of Longfellow and were included in his Poems of Places and other verse which Edmund Clarence Stedman said was superior in merit to his own efforts.

I began to write in my childhood and to make speeches in my early youth. At twenty-four I wrote an epic poem upon the war, giving in sombre and gloomy tones the incidents of the sad careers of Josiah White and his sweetheart, with the scene laid at Phœnixville along the French Creek and the Schuylkill River. I give below a piece of early occasional verse, a tribute to my mother and a sonnet to Lloyd Mifflin, written within the last few years. Some of my translations of German hymns may be found in Brumbaugh's Christopher Dock, in my Pennsylvania in American History, and a translation from the German verse of Pastorius was set to music by the Orpheus Club of Philadelphia and sung two winters at the Academy of Music. 136