American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; American literature -- Catholic authors -- History and criticism
“Yet he was a man
Whom no one could have passed without remark,
Active and nervous was his gait; his limbs,
And his whole figure, breathed intelligence.”
Mr. Lathrop was born in Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, August 25, 1851.
It was a fit place for a poet’s birthplace, “those gardens in perfect
bloom, girded about with creaming waves.” He came of Puritan stock,
the founder of his family being the Rev. John Lathrop, a Separatist
minister, who came to Massachusetts in 1634. Some of his kinsmen have
borne a noble part in the creation of an American literature, notably
the historian of the Dutch and the genial autocrat, Wendell Holmes.
His primary education was had in the public schools of New York; from
thence he went to Dresden, Germany, returning in 1870 to study law
at Columbia College. Law was little to his liking. The dry and musty
tomes, wherein is written some truth and not a little error, sanctioned
by one generation of wiseacres to be whittled past recognition by
another generation of the same species, could hardly hope to hold in
thraldom a mind that had from boyhood browsed in the royal demesne of
literature. Law and literature, despite the smart sayings of a few
will not run in the same rut. In abandoning law for literature, he but
followed the law of his being. What law lost literature gained. On a
trip abroad a year later he met Rose Hawthorne, the second daughter
of the great Nathaniel, wooed, and won her. This marriage was by far
the happiest event in his life, the crowning glory of his manhood, a
fountain of bliss to sustain his after life. Years later, in a little
poem entitled, “Love that Lives,” referring to the woman that was his
all, he addresses her in words that needed no coaxing by the muses, but
had long been distilled by his heart, ready for his pen to give them a
setting and larger life.
“Dear face—bright, glinting hair—
Dear life, whose heart is mine—
The thought of you is prayer,
The love of you divine.
In starlight, or in rain;
In the sunset’s shrouded glow;
Ever, with joy or pain,
To you my quick thoughts go.”
And summing up, he tells us the kind of a bond that holds them. It is
the
“Love that lives;
Its spring-time blossoms blow
’Mid the fruit that autumn gives;
And its life outlasts the snow.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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