A mournful interest attaches to the work of Mary Louise Chitwood, who was born at Mount Carmel, October 29, 1832, and died there twenty-three years later, sincerely mourned by the whole choir of Western poets. Prentice had encouraged her, and he wrote a memoir to accompany a volume of her verses that appeared in 1857. Her work promised well, though it shared the defects of most of the verse of the day. Sarah T. Bolton is one of the most interesting figures in Coggeshall, and though born in Kentucky (1820), her long life was spent principally in Indiana. Her husband, Nathaniel Bolton, edited the first newspaper ever published in Indianapolis. Mrs. Bolton began writing at an early age, and through many years it may be said that she stood for poetry in Indiana. Many of her poems are stiff and formal and show little originality; but often her pieces are free and spontaneous, and she had humor, which most of the early poets of the West lacked. Her last volume (1891) is dedicated “To the poets of Indiana, my children after the spirit.” She was known to Willis and Morris, of the Knickerbocker group contemporary with her. Her husband was appointed consul at Geneva in 1855, and she lived for a number of years abroad, finding fresh material for poems in her travels. She died at Indianapolis in 1893. Her best-known poem is “Paddle Your Own Canoe.” She was a loyal Indianian and wrote the lines:-- “The winds of Heaven never fanned, The circling sunlight never spanned The borders of a better land Than our own Indiana.” Benjamin S. Parker, of all the poets discovered in Indiana by Coggeshall, acquired the greatest skill in versification, and wrote most comprehensively of the pioneer life. He was born on a farm near New Castle (1833), and is one, at least, to whom the phrase “racy of the soil” needs no explanation. He lived in a log cabin, performing the hardest farm labor, and long observation of life at the West made him an authority in matters of customs and dialect. His volume “The Cabin in the Clearing” (1887) contains many poems in which the trials of the earlier settlers are graphically depicted, and it was his right, as one who had aided in the rough work of the pioneers, to urge the new generations to use worthily the opportunities which they inherited. Of the fauna and flora of his own woodlands Mr. Parker became the especial celebrant. The following lines from one of his most graceful pieces are characteristic of his happiest moods:-- “I had a dream of other days,-- In golden luxury waved the wheat; In tangled greenness shook the maize; The squirrels ran with nimble feet, And in and out among the trees The hangbird darted like a flame; The cat-bird piped his melodies, Purloining every warbler’s fame: And then I heard triumphal song, ’Tis morning and the days are long.”