Ohio History Journal

JOHN JAMES PIATT, REPRESENTATIVE FIGURE

OF A MOMENTOUS PERIOD

 

By CLARE DOWLER

 

Biographical and Critical Study.

The development of Ohio from 1830 to I880 was spectacular.

It characterized, in a fashion, the development of the whole nation.

In this typical region, it would be hard to find a more representa-

tive man than John James Piatt. His life span began as Ohio was

emerging out of the wilderness, as "Johnny Appleseed's" trees

were bearing abundantly, and as the completion of a system of

internal canals and waterways filliped the growth of the State to

an accelerated speed. In his boyhood he was excited by the new

marvels of steam--by Robert Fulton's steamboat which, only

twenty-three years before Piatt's birth, had startled the woods-

men and settlers along the Ohio as it paddled its way from Pitts-

burgh to New Orleans; by the steam locomotive which only five

years before Piatt's birth had drawn a train of cars along twenty-

three miles of track on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Piatt's

images, his themes, his references illustrate strikingly the imprint

of the new mode of life upon his generation.

He had not the qualities of a Daniel Boone. In the periodic

westward movements of frontiersmen, Boone represented the first,

the trail-blazer-Indian-killer type. Piatt represented the second,

the tiller of the soil, the man who subjugated the ruthless forces

of nature, who began to grope for expression and tried to make

articulate the life he represented. Nor had he the background of

a James Russell Lowell. Piatt's forebears should not be dis-

paraged, although they excelled in wars, rebelling against tyranny,

rather than in literary accomplishment.

It was good that his ancestors were of the crusading type,

that he himself was what he was, for in general, the effete east-

erner could not write about the new West like one actually bred in

(1)

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2      OHIO ARCHEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

it. It took a Piatt to catch in words the marriage of nature with

new mechanical inventions; to dramatize the railroads; to feel the

wide prairie; to understand the hard work, the back-wrenching

toil of the pioneer.

Although his poetry has not and will not set the world on fire,

yet he has caught and kept for posterity in such poems as "The

Lost Farm," "The Pioneer's Chimney," "The Mower in Ohio,"

and "Riding to Vote"¹ the stirring picture of a colossal move-

ment in the midst of which he lived and which will never come

again.

Furthermore, even though he lacked actual genius, still he

was better qualified by first hand information to deal with his

particular subjects than are most writers. Moreover he caught

the spirit of the men around him, their sanity, optimism and

energy.

In all these things he was a true representative of a great his-

torical period. He typified especially the faith of the nineteenth

century in schooling. He took advantage of all educational

opportunities. His public school training, his study at Capital

University Grammar School, his short sojourn at Kenyon College,

his newspaper training, and his constant attempt at self-teaching

by writing and reading, all point in the same direction. He was a

precursor of the thousands of young men now attending the many

educational institutions of Ohio and the millions now attending

schools west of the Alleghanies. Kenyon College and Capital

University are both excellent examples and forerunners of the

many fine academic institutions which dot the State of Ohio.

Piatt's family itself was typical of the time, for it illustrated

the mobility of the frontiersmen. And not least remarkable

among the phenomena of the time were the great shifts of popula-

tion in resurgent masses as men sought new El Dorados--richer

land. He was typical, too, in his practicality and his combining

of the ideal with the practical. There was nothing of the retired

prophet in him. He went out of his way to make contacts with

men who later advanced his interests. His first position in Wash-

 

1 All these poems are to be found in John J. Piatt, Idyls and Lyrics of the

Ohio Valley (Cincinnati, 1881), 9, 27, 75, 60.

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JOHN JAMES PIATT                      3

ington came to him as a result of his friendship with an Ohio

statesman, Salmon P. Chase. All through his life he was in-

volved in politics to the extent of holding office. Idealism joined

to common sense and shrewdness made the true representative of

the time--the poet whose writing did not support his family, but

whose job as a postal clerk did.

In that section where the Ohio River forms the boundary of

Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky with the same liquid band, two

poets spent their childhood. One, a woman, from the hardy

stock of Daniel Boone, grew up in Kentucky; while the other,

descended from a long line of illustrious ancestors and destined

to be her husband, was born on March I, I835, and spent his

early youth in an Indiana village, James' Mills, now Milton, in

Dearborn County, only a few miles from the Ohio border. A

picture of the life of a boy in a rural community at that time is

very well painted in A Boy's Town and Years of My Youth,² by

William Dean Howells, who was born but two years later than

Piatt and who grew up under circumstances very similar to those

of Piatt's youth. Until 1845 the Piatt family stayed at Milton

where John James improved himself by attending school at Rising

Sun, Indiana, a small town near by.   One recollection of this

period of his life is mentioned by the poet in The Hesperian

Tree.³ There he speaks of going to the postoffice at Rising Sun in

1843 to get a magazine, the May number of Graham's, in which

he saw a facsimile of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's signature

for the first time. His interest in Longfellow began then and

continued throughout both their lives.  Piatt also related in

Pencilled Fly-leaves4 that as a boy of about ten he had read some

of Shakespeare--Macbeth, King Richard, Julius Caesar--and cer-

tain sea stories and old romances. Such reading by a boy only

ten years old is really significant.

When John James was in his tenth year, his parents moved

to Columbus, Ohio, where he received private instruction. After

a short time the family moved again, this time to a place a few

2 William Dean Howells, A Boy's Town (New York, 1890); William Dean

Howells, Years of My Youth (New York, 1916).

3 John J. Piatt "An Acquaintance with Longfellow," in The Hesperian Tree.

Second ed. (Columbus, Ohio, 1903), 134.

4 John  J. Piatt, Pencilled  Fly-leaves  (Cincinnati, 1880), 29-30.

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4      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

miles north of Columbus. Here the boy attended a western log

school house typical of the period, but not for long. In 1849 he

came into Columbus to stay with the family of his uncle, Charles

Scott, who published the Ohio State Journal The plan was to

have him learn the printer's trade although he found time at

scattered intervals to attend school. He is on the roster of Capital

University for the year 1850-18515  and 1851-18526 as a student

in the Grammar School.

Howells reflected shrewdly in A Boy's Town that youngsters

are limited in their outlook and that they see, not reality itself,

but as it affects them. John James spent eleven of the most

plastic years of his life in the vicinity of Columbus, the capital of

a rapidly growing state, and what is more significant, he worked

for a newspaper. It is worth noting, however, that even allowing

for the idiosyncrasies of childhood, he picked up a broad knowl-

edge of what was happening to the State during these important

years. Ohio was passing beyond the pioneer stage; a good in-

ternal transportation system of canals, roads, and railroads was

helping the farmers to lessen the effects of the 1837 depression

by making possible the cheap shipment of farm produce to other

markets. Industry and wealth of other forms were springing up.

Certainly the discovery of gold in California in 1848 was known

in Columbus, and the impetus given by it to the westward trek

would surely be remarked in a city through which one of the

best roads to the West, the National Highway, passed. The boy,

fourteen years old in 1849, was no doubt aware of what was

happening. His best poems reflect this influence. They mirror a

transient but important phase of American national life.

Several references to this early, Columbus period of Piatt's

life are to be found in the biographical writings of Howells. Two

of the most pertinent are here quoted:

There must have been some mention in it [Howells' Diary] of the tre-

mendous combat with wet sponges I saw there [composing room of the

Ohio State Journal] one day between two of the boys who hurled them

back and forth at each other. This amiable fray, carried on during the

foreman's absence, forced upon my notice for the first time the boy who

 

5 Catalog of Capital University, Columbus, Ohio, 1850-1851, 7.

6 Catalog of Capital University, Columbus, Ohio, 1851-1852, 6.

 

 

 

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JOHN JAMES PIATT                          5

 

has come to be a name well-known in literature. I admired his vigor as

a combatant, but I never spoke to him at that time, and I never dreamed

that he, too, was effervescing with verse, probably as fiercely as myself.

Six or seven years later we met again, when we had both become journal-

ists, and both had poems accepted by Mr. Lowell for the Atlantic Monthly,

and then we formed a literary friendship which eventuated in the joint pub-

lication of a volume of verse.7

I believe I did not think any great things of other pieces which he

printed in the State Journal; and it was in the book room, where I was

afterward transferred, that I all unwittingly met the truest poet of our

Middle West, and one of the truest poets of any time or place. With the

name of John James Piatt I would gladly relate my own more memorably

than in the Poems of Two Friends, long since promptly forgotten, where

I joined him in our first literary venture. We are now old men, hard upon

our eighties, but we were then boys of thirteen or fourteen, with no dream

of our adventure in joint-authorship, and we had our boyish escapades in

the long leisure of the spring afternoons of 1850, when we did not yet

know each other even by the nature of poets which we shared.

I can see Piatt now, his blue eyes laughing to tears in our romps and

scuffles, and I can hear the trickling mirth of his reluctant chuckle, distinct

across the days of the years that have brought us so far. He was setting

up House Bills and Senate Bills too, with whatever 'subjective effect, in

the intervals of our frolic, but his head must have been involved in the

sunny mists that wrapt mine round.⁸

Later he spent some time at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio.

There is a stirring allusion to his feelings as a freshman in a

poem entitled "A Boy on Gambler Hill."⁹ He sung of "the dull

pang, the eager thrill," of the emotions which overpower the nor-

mal boy when he first sees the campus of his college. He is

listed as a freshman from Columbus, in the Kenyon College

catalog for 1853-1854. There is no catalog extant in the Kenyon

College library for the year 1854-1855, and his name does not

appear in the catalog for 1855-1856. The General Catalogue of

Kenyon College published in 1899 includes his name among the

Non-graduates of the class of 1857.

During Piatt's residence either in Columbus or at Kenyon

College, he began to write verse. Emerson Venable is authority

for the assertion that he was inspired to do it by reading Leigh

Hunt's "Imagination and Fancy."¹⁰ Whether or not that was

the source of inspiration, he persisted in his efforts for many

years.

 

7 William Dean Howells, My Literary Passions (New York, 1891), 45.

8 Howells, Years of My Youth, 79.

9 John J. Piatt, Odes in Ohio and Other Poems (Cincinnati, 1897), 37.

10 Emerson Venable, Poets of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1919), 166.

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6      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

In 1856 the family, probably actuated by the pioneer spirit,

for by this time the frontier had gone west of Ohio, moved to

Shelby County, Illinois. A common practice among the early

pioneers was for the boldest spirits to go to the frontier, carve a

home and farm out of the wilderness, and then when the region

became settled, to move on to the new frontier and repeat the

process. This did not ordinarily happen often during one man's

lifetime, but during the lifetime of Piatt's father the frontier

moved westward so rapidly that at least three changes were neces-

sary to keep him on or near it. Illinois did not become a per-

manent home for the poet's father, for some time after young

Piatt had struck out for himself, his father made a jump from

Illinois to Montana--the new frontier. On November 11, 1889,

in Queenstown, Ireland, Piatt wrote a poem "To My Father on

His Eighty-fourth Birthday," indicating in a note that at that

time the elder Piatt was a resident of Montana.¹l

Illinois with its new settlements and its wide plains offered

practically untouched subjects for poetry. Piatt had begun to

write verse in Ohio, but it was in Illinois that he showed his true

mettle. In Mac-a-Cheek Castle, the famous home of Donn Piatt

near West Liberty, Ohio, is a copy of Western Windows. Since

Donn and John James were kinsmen and close friends, it is prob-

able that Western Windows had been left there by the author

himself. This seems still more likely because after almost every

poem in the book is a statement in ink of the date and place of

composition, written in a hand that is, if not Piatt's, certainly one

with remarkable resemblance to it. The poems ascribed to the

Illinois period in this book are: "To My Brother Guy," 1856;

"Fires in Illinois," October, 1856; "The Morning Street," Aug-

ust, 1858; and "Taking the Night Train," September, 1859.12

Not all of Piatt's time in Illinois was spent with his parents

on the newly made farm. Since Scott, with whom he had studied

the printing business in Columbus, had removed to Chicago, he

spent several months with him there. One interesting incident in

the young man's life occurred on the return journey from this

 

11 Piatt, Odes in Ohio, 49.

12 John J. Piatt, Western Windows and Other Poems (Cincinnati, 1881).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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JOHN JAMES PIATT

visit with his uncle. Piatt himself tells about it in an article,

"An Old Bit of Schoolboy Manuscript."13 The gist of the inci-

dent is that in Tolono, Illinois, where he had to change trains,

he sat during breakfast at the right of Abraham Lincoln, who was

enroute to debate with Stephen A. Douglas. Piatt at first mistook

Lincoln for a clergyman. The privilege of having eaten with the

great President was appreciated by him more in later life than it

was at the time it happened. This bit of good fortune came to

him in September, 1858.

During the prairie farm days several poems contributed to

the Louisville (Kentucky) Journal were accepted (1857), among

them being "The Forgotten Street" and "Fires in Illinois."

George D. Prentice, the rather famous editor of that newspaper,

was very favorably impressed with the poems and arranged for

the young man to become his confidential secretary. Prentice had

come to Louisville from the East, had built up one of the

most powerful and best newspapers west of the Alleghanies and

had endeared himself to the people of the region. Witty, intelli-

gent, level-headed, a competent editor in every way, he also

achieved some distinction as a poet. He recognized merit un-

grudgingly and was especially sympathetic to young writers of the

frontier. Among others, he encouraged Sarah Morgan Bryan,

who was later to become Mrs. John James Piatt, and published

some of her poetry in the Journal. Both Prentice and Piatt, who

was then a member of the editorial staff as well as confidential

secretary to the editor, thought her poetry original and beautiful.

Piatt went so far as to make a journey into the interior of the

state to see her, and thus began the acquaintanceship that cul-

minated in their marriage.

Prentice was very much pleased with several of Piatt's poems

and sent "The Morning Street" to Lowell, editor of the Atlantic

Monthly. Lowell also admired the poem and personally wrote to

the author congratulating him.¹⁴ A more substantial acknowledge-

ment of Lowell's appreciation was made when "The Morning

Street" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.¹⁵

13 The Hesperian Tree (1903), 36.

14 Venable, op. cit., 166.

15 The Atlantic Monthly (Boston, 1857-), III (February, 1859), 150.

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8      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

Early in 1859 Piatt visited Columbus and met Howells, who

was then on the staff of a paper there. Although they had not

known one another very well in former years, and had long

been separated since that time, the two men found much in com-

mon. Together they wrote The Poems of Two Friends, and the

title expressed a relationship which lasted for a lifetime. Al-

though the little volume had a small sale, less than two hundred

copies, according to Howells,l⁶ it has since become rather valuable

to collectors because it is the first volume of both the authors.

The influence of his environment begins to show itself in his

first book. The best of Piatt's poetry, that part on which his repu-

tation rests, deals with contemporary life in the newly settled

West. In 1859 the young poet was twenty-four years old; he was

in his most plastic period, during which he gained perforce an

intimate knowledge of the lives, troubles, and work of the pio-

neers. Although the ominous threat of civil war, the secession of

states, and the slavery question expressed in incidents like the

Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 and John Brown's Raid in 1859

were coming to a head and looming large in the emotions of many

people, no sign of this stirring influence is to be seen in Piatt's

first book of poetry nor in his actions as far as they are known.

The pioneer influence of his youth remained, but the political

changes seemed to leave no mark on him.

Personally he was alert to political opportunities; one can-

not doubt that, considering his later service with the Federal

Government; but perhaps because of his youth, perhaps because

of the difference between the newspaper service of that time and

this, national questions of moment from 1850 to 1860 apparently

passed over him.

Piatt's finest poem in Poems of Two Friends shows the in-

fluence of his early environment. It is "The Western Pioneer"

in which the bees presage the coming of the white man to the

red man's country:

 

16 Howells, My Literary Passions, 45.

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JOHN JAMES PIATT                           9

 

THE WESTERN PIONEER

(The bees are said to have ever swarmed westward before the steps

of the whites.)

Into the prairies' boundless blossom,

Into the Wide West's sunburnt bosom,

The earliest emigrants came:

The flowers, like sunny miracles, grew

Before them, fragrant, from the dew,

Filling the grass like flame!

From some old land of song and life--

Of man, in manhood's glowing strife,

Departing all alone,

And journeying with the journeying sun,

They came--their busy empire won--

Before the white man known.

The Indian saw the moving Bees,

From flower to flower, in dream-like breeze

Blowing their pilgrim way;

Or, deep in honey of the flower,

Hanging in sunshine hour by hour,

Dream through the dreaming day.

He saw the Future's garment gleam

O'er mounds of tribes and legend-stream--

O'er the sweet waste of flowers;

He saw his hunting ground--the Past!

Lit with the domes of cities vast--

Glory of spires and towers!

Those other Bees! He felt--he saw,

With sorrowing eye, in dreamy awe,

The blossom of the West

Thrill with the sunny-toiling Bees

Of busy Freedom, happy Peace--

Wide blessings and the blest.

They come! They came! Lo! they are here!

The Indian heart-beat everywhere

Starts echoes wild no more;

The leaves have fallen from his trees

Of life; dead leaves, in every breeze,

Rustle forevermore!

At the age of twenty-six Piatt was co-author of a volume of

poetry but was not financially able to do what he pleased. Lin-

coln, however, chose Chase, an Ohio man, for his secretary of

the treasury, and in less than a month after Lincoln's administra-

tion began (March, 1861), Chase had appointed his friend, Piatt,

as a clerk in the Treasury Department. With an assured income

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1O      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

Piatt felt free to bring his romance with Sarah Morgan Bryan

to its logical conclusion. On the eighteenth of the following June

he married her at Newcastle, Kentucky.

The Piatts lived at Woodley, Georgetown Heights, District

of Columbia (Georgetown has since been brought within the

incorporate limits of Washington) at a distance of about one mile

from the Executive Mansion; indeed, Piatt always walked from

his home to the Treasury Department. Those were happy days

for the young couple. The poet, twenty-six years old, and his

twenty-five-year-old poet-wife surely thought of the political tur-

moil and the incipient war as something outside themselves. Real

life for the poet-lovers was in their home where they spent many

serene hours planning their first joint volume.

While living in Washington, Piatt became acquainted with

many famous men, not the least of whom was Walt Whitman. A

notable year in Piatt's life was 1863, for it was in May of this

year that he first visited Cambridge, Massachusetts, and while

there visited Lowell. Chase had sent after Piatt a letter of in-

troduction to Longfellow, but it was an unnecessary gesture be-

cause Lowell took Piatt to call upon the author of "The Chil-

dren's Hour." This was on May 28, and from that day Piatt's

friendship with Longfellow continued until the latter's death in

1882. Let Piatt describe the call:

The elder poet--the editor was twelve years younger--greeted me

very pleasantly, invited me to a seat by the open fire (for the day was a

New England May-day), offered me a cigar, and, since I had come from

Washington, he began to speak of friends there, asking me if I knew

Charles Sumner (I had only seen him; I had never known him); and then

inquired about Mr. Chase with whom I believe, his relations were very

friendly. It will be remembered that Stephen Longfellow, the poet's

father, had studied law with Mr. Chase's uncle, Salmon Chase. He also

inquired about Solger, a German writer, long since dead, then like myself,

in the Treasury Department, seeming to feel gratified at having recently

learned that he had secured a place--I dare say he had recommended him.

(I remember to have seen a private letter to Secretary Chase in March,

1861, in which the poet suggested the propriety or policy of appointing

Senator Sumner as minister to England.) Later he spoke of Mr. William

D. Howells, remarking on the peculiar and striking opening to the latter's

poem, "Louis Labeau's Conversion", then recently printed in the Atlantic

Monthly, wherein the poet makes the sound of bells from the Venetian

Campanile suggest the pioneer camp-meeting and "the fair humanities of

old religion" (the Wesleyan or Methodist denomination) on the Ohio River

near Gallipolis. He asked also about Mr. William D. Gallagher, our earliest

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JOHN JAMES PIATT                          II

 

Western poet--then sojourning at Washington--saying that he used to

write very spirited verses. Thomas Buchanan Read was mentioned in re-

calling Western poets, and Mr. Longfellow told of a recent visit from Read,

and laughingly related how enthusiastic the artist-poet--then living at Cin-

cinnati--had been in speaking of the war (he had been serving as staff-officer

under General Lew Wallace). Political matters in Ohio, Vallandigham and

the Dayton mob, were discussed, the editor--who was always more of a

politician than neighbor--taking a leading part in the talk. Mr. Longfellow

had the warm, genial and hearty expression of health and vigorous life;

age had scarcely begun to show itself, though he had suffered much. The

second great grief of his life had come to him less than two years before.¹⁷

His hair was only iron gray, and his full beard had not yet that fall of

snow which covered it when next I saw him. I was greatly pleased with

the visit, as I told the kind friend who accompanied me, after leaving the

house.18

While in Washington Piatt and his wife collaborated to pro-

duce a volume, The Nests at Washington and Other Poems, which

was published in 1864 by a New York firm, Walter Low. A

complimentary copy of the book elicited the following letter

from  Longfellow:

CAMBRIDGE, May 12, 1864.

MY DEAR SIR:

I have had the pleasure of receiving your book of poems, and have

read it through, from cover to cover, with very uncommon satisfaction and

delight. I congratulate you upon your success.

I beg that you will make my congratulations acceptable to your "other

me," who, like the feminine rhyme in French poetry, or the double ending

in our own, so beautifully and gracefully closes the volume.

I was in Washington last Decemberi but was so driven from pillar

to post in your City of the Lost Footsteps, and between Alexandria and

the capitol, that I did not find time to hunt you up, which I very much

regretted.

I remain, dear sir, with cordial good wishes,

Yours very truly,

HENRY W. LONGFELOW.19

Poems in Sunshine and Firelight, the first volume of which

Piatt was the sole author, was published in 1866 and received

much favorable comment from reviewers.²⁰

A year later his service in Washington was terminated, and

in 1868 the family made its permanent abode at North Bend, Ohio,

a small town on the river near Cincinnati, known chiefly as the

 

17 The first grief referred to was the death of Longfellow's wife, Mary S.

Potter Longfellow, who became ill and died while they were traveling in Holland in

1835. In 1843 he married Frances Elizabeth Appleton who was tragically burned to

death in 1861--this being Longfellow's second great grief.

18 Piatt, "An Acquaintance with Longfellow," loc. cit., 135.

19 The Hesperian Tree (1903), 137.

20 See especially the Atlantic Monthly, XVII (May, 1866), 653-55.

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12      OHIO ARCHEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

location of the home and of the tomb of President William Henry

Harrison. Here Piatt lived intermittently for the remainder of

his life.

The Piatt home was in a very desirable location, for it was

situated on a hill about three hundred feet above the Ohio River

at a place where it makes a bend. Not far from this point the

Great Miami River flows into the Ohio, so that there was a river

view from nearly all the windows in the house. The two-acre

estate slopes to the river from the house, the slope being covered,

and still is, with natural growth unspoiled by man's landscaping

efforts. Only one undesirable feature is evident, and this Piatt

did not regard as a defect, if one can judge by his poems. The

Ohio and Mississippi Railroad passed along the foot of the hill so

that the house was at times shaken by the passing of a heavy

freight train.  In Piatt's poetry trains are colorful, exciting,

dramatic.   See, for instance, "Taking the Night Train,"21

"Walking to the Station,"22 and "Passengers."23 When Piatt

was working in Cincinnati and commuting, he found that having

a train pass across his front yard was a convenience; during the

winter he probably wished the track were at his doorstep. In a

letter to Paul Hamilton Hayne he wrote:

. . . We have had nothing but snow and ice since Thanksgiving Day.

It was fine for the little boys with their sleds but--to me, going early and

coming late, up and down our river hill--to and from the train--it has

nearly worn me out.24

The house itself was a frame building, one story and a half

high, with French windows in the ends and with a broad front

porch. Inside were many books. Hanging above the mantel was

an oil painting of Mrs. Piatt by Theodore Kauffman, and on a

bracket between the long front windows was a small bust of Long-

fellow with an engraving of Ary Schaeffer's "Hebe" over it;

among numerous engravings and photographs hung a framed

autographed letter from Charles Dickens to Piatt; and a portrait

and autograph of Christina Rosetti. He evidently lost no oppor-

 

21 John J. Piatt, Poems in Sunshine and Firelight (Cincinnati, 1866), 50.

22 "John J. Piatt, Landmarks and Other Poems (New York, 1872), 35.

23 Piatt, Poems in Sunshine and Firelight, 31-32.

24 John J. Piatt to Paul Hamilton Hayne, February 20, 1881, Paul Hamilton

Hayne MSS. (In Manuscript Collection, Duke University Library.)

• 12
 

JOHN JAMES PIATT                         13

tunity in making the acquaintance of writers, and consequently

was on speaking, or perhaps one should say, writing terms with

many persons of literary consequence and many more of near

prominence.

In order to support the establishment at North Bend, Piatt

filled an editorial position on the Cincinnati Chronicle, a daily

newspaper, during part of 1868 and 1869. In 1869, he became

affiliated with another Cincinnati newspaper, the Commercial.

This connection lasted until 1878 although for several years of

this period he occupied an official position at Washington.

About the time of publication and republication of Western

Windows and Other Poems, that is, from  1868 through 1872, the

poet reached the zenith of his popularity. Life seemed to hold

high promise. The first edition of the book was reviewed in at

least nine places.²⁵

During these busy years Piatt had time while in Cambridge

to visit Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier at Amsbury.

Shortly after this journey to Cambridge, in 1870, he took his

second official position in Washington. First he was enrolling

clerk in the House of Representatives; then in 1871 he became

librarian of the House of Representatives.

This same year he published a new volume of verse, The

Pioneer's Chimney, and the following year two more volumes;

one, Landmarks and Other Poems; the other, a new edition of

Western Windows and Other Poems.

From Landmarks and Other Poems comes the following:

 

SNOW FALLING

The wonderful snow is falling,

Over river and woodland and wold;

The trees bear spectral blossom

In the moonshine blurr'd and cold.

There's a beautiful garden in Heaven;

And these are the banished flowers,

Falling and driven and drifted

Into this dark world of ours!

25 The London Athenaeum, London Spectator The Independent The North

American Review, Putnam's Monthly New York Tribune, Harper's Weekly, Provi^-

dence, Rhode Island, Press and Atlantic Monthly. Quotations from these critical

opinions appeared in an advertisement by Hurd and Houghton, New York, in an

edition of Western Windows and Other Poems, published by them in 1872.

• 13
 

14       OHIO ARCHEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Doubtless hundreds of children over a period of years learned

these two stanzas, because they had the distinction of appearing

in one of the well-known McGuffey Readers.²⁶

In 1874 a pathetic incident happened which shows the stuff

the Piatt family was made of.

The family came home from a long stay in Washington, one evening

in summer, July 3rd, glad, father and mother and children, to reach the

fresh, green fragrant, spot, after a tedious and dusty journey. Gayest of

all was the little eldest son, Victor, a gentle, lovely boy, especially attached

to his mother. He had a merry day on the morrow, "the Fourth". Just

at dusk, as his father came home from the city, he was playing with some

powder which he had stored in a bottle, when it exploded--and the same

instant the little fellow ran toward them crying assuringly, "Mamma, I am

not hurt much!" But the next moment he was no longer with them.27

It recalls Robert Browning's "An Incident in a French

Camp."

Piatt evidently at this time became interested in stories of

men's lives, for much of his literary endeavor during the next

two years was in the biographical field. Prentice had died in

1870, and in 1875 Piatt edited a volume of the poems of his old

friend and benefactor.²⁸ Among the features of the book was

a thirty-eight page biographical sketch by Piatt. The same year

he wrote a twelve page biography of Forceythe Willson, another

minor poet of Kentucky, for the Atlantic Monthly.²⁹          Piatt also

wrote a review of Edmund C. Stedman's poetry for the Atlantic

Monthly in 1878.30

In 1879 Piatt collected all his own poems that were pertinent

to the title into a volume which he called Poems of House and

Home.

The same year finds him working as money-order issuing

clerk in the Cincinnati Postoffice, a position that he held for sev-

eral years. This work was more or less uncongenial to him.

26 William Holmes McGuffey, Fifth Eclectic Reader. Revised ed. (New York

and Cincinnati, 1879), 246. The poem was accompanied by a note stating that its

author began to write verses at the age of fourteen. For a discussion of the influence

of McGuffey's Readers, see Henry I. Brock, "Six Books That Helped Mold the

Nation," in New York Times Magazine (February 25, 1984) 10.

27 Richard Henry Stoddard and others, Poet's Homes tBoston, 1877), 69.

28 John J. Piatt (ed.), Poems of George D. Prentice, with a Biographical Sketch

(Cincinnati, 1876).

29 Atlantic Monthly, XXXV (March, 1876), 832-44. Ralph Waldo Emerson, too,

was interested in Forceythe Willson and published one of his poems, "In State,"

in his Parnassus (Boston, 1874), 255-57.

30 John J. Piatt, "Mr. Stedman's Poetry," in Atlantic Monthly, XLI (March,

1878), 818-19.

• 14
 

JOHN JAMES PIATT                      15

The hours were long; the work itself, drudgery. However, the

income was absolutely necessary to support his family. Some

idea of his attitude toward the job can be obtained from a letter

to Hayne, a southern poet with whom Piatt had some corre-

spondence.

But I am, . . . the hapless slave of a government office--the Cincin-

nati Post-Office--in which I hold one of the most exacting and{ despotic

posts that of Money-Order Issuing Clerk; and during the last month I

have been driven, driven, all the time by . . . the constantly coming man

at the window (ten of him at a time, sometimes):

Oh it was pitiful--

Near a whole city-ful!

He has at last become fiend like to me and tortures me like some poor

devil.³¹

One consequence of the Christmas rush at the postoffice to

which Piatt alludes in the above quotation was to prevent his

attending the birthday dinner given by the Atlantic Monthly in

Boston, on December 3, 1879, for its contributors in honor of the

seventieth birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

During the years 1879 and 1880 Piatt expended most of his

literary effort on The Union of American Poetry and Art, an

anthology which he was preparing at the request of a publisher,

W. E. Dibble. It was a monumental work, published and dis-

tributed in sections to subscribers. Each part contained poetry

representative of a geographical section of the country. Through

this work came a rift in the growing friendship between Piatt and

Hayne. The southern section was the last to be published. Piatt

had early asked Hayne for suggestions and permission to use

some of his poems. Hayne replied generously, sending not only

his own poems, some of them laboriously copied by hand, but

other southern poets' as well. Piatt was graciously grateful, as

was to be expected in 1880, but when the southern section was

published and Hayne saw a copy, their correspondence, hitherto

very friendly, ceased abruptly. Hayne's personal copy of The

Union of American Poetry and Art, the sections bound together

in two fine, large volumes, contains no mark to show why Hayne

31 Piatt to Hayne, January 1, 1879 (1880), Hayne MSS.

• 15
 

16 OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

was displeased with it. That he was displeased there can be no

doubt, for he wrote to a friend:

Glancing over the pages of two large octavo vols--edited by Jno.

James Piatt, called "American Poetry and Art,"--I find myself represented

as the most atrocious of wooden-headed donkeys; a son, or twin brother

of the immortal Capt. Buzzby in Dombey & Son.32

It may be that Hayne felt slighted because the southern sec-

tion, originally planned for earlier publication, was postponed

until last when, because money was short, it had to be somewhat

curtailed. To a southern gentleman of Hayne's stamp, made

doubly touchy by the Civil War, the neglect of his section and of

himself, although unintended and slight, might be considered a

personal affront.

Concurrently with the preparation and publication of The

Union of American Poetry and Art, Piatt's affairs were coming

to a crisis at the postoffice. There was much political intrigue

involved, but one charge, poor handwriting, against the poet seems

to have a firm foundation. The postmaster, Loge, was evidently

afraid of losing his job, a justifiable fear because General Thomas

Lowry Young used to come to the postoffice for private confer-

ences with the clerk, Piatt, no doubt a suspicious circumstance to

the postmaster since Young had suggested Piatt as a possible

successor to Loge. Then too, there was the charge of illegibility

of handwriting which the postmaster, with reason, brought against

Piatt. Whatever the reason, the postmaster removed Piatt from

his clerkship on July 16, 1881.

During the last few months of his incumbency at the post-

office Piatt had been trying to get a federal appointment to some

consulship. He sent a remarkable petition for such an appoint-

ment (The idea was Stedman's.) to the President. Many famous

men signed it, among them Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier,

Stedman, Howells, Hayne, Dr. Joseph Gilbert Holland, Thomas

Bailey Aldrich and John Hay. Probably no like document was

ever before presented to a President on behalf of an American

 

32 Paul Hamilton Hayne to Charles Etienne Arthur Gayarre, April 28, 1886,

Copse Hill, Georgia (Hayne's home), ibid.

• 16
 

JOHN JAMES PIATT                         17

citizen. And it brought results; in June, 1882, Piatt sailed from

New York for Cork, Ireland, to become United States consul.33

Piatt's creative period ends here. From 1882 until April,

1893, he was United States consul at Cork, Ireland; from April

until September of the same year, he was consul at Dublin, Ire-

land. While in Ireland he published a few volumes (mostly

filled with old poems) through Cork, Dublin, and London book

publishers. Almost all of his creative work was completed,

though, before he left the United States. After his return to

America in 1894 he lived at North Bend, Ohio, on his estate

overlooking the Ohio River. Either shortly before or after he

returned to North Bend, a fire destroyed his first home; then he

had a house remodelled to resemble an Irish house that had

seemed attractive to him abroad.

He edited, in 1900, The Hesperian Tree, a collection of poetry

and prose pieces referring to or written by authors of the Ohio

Valley. He collected some new material and published a second

edition of the work in 1903. During a few months in 1907 he

was co-editor with E. J. Wohlgemuth of a fortnightly magazine

called Midland which, as the name suggests, was of particular

interest to people in the Ohio Valley.

The last years of his life were spent in quiet retirement on

his estate where in the summer he and his wife--both very fond

of birds--would take daily walks among the trees and under-

growth. Often on Sundays his daughter, Miriam, whom he

called "Birdie," would play the piano and sing for him. He

frequently spent the winters in the city of Cincinnati. In I914,

Piatt was permanently injured by being accidentally thrown from

his carriage when a wheel came off a short distance from home.

He died three years later at the age of eighty-two.

Piatt lived through the period when frontier influences were

at their height. As has been seen, he spent his boyhood in a

 

33 It became the custom many years ago for the king to patronize the arts.

Even in a democratic country the feeling that the Government should support literary

men survived as late as the nineteenth century. The United States Government sent

Washington Irving, Lowell, Howells, Bret Harte, and Piatt to Europe with jobs

which would support them while allowing them leisure to write. Irving went to

Spain and England, Lowell to Spain and England, Howells to Italy, Harte to Ger-

many, and Piatt to Ireland, whereas Hawthorne had his custom house appointment.

• 17
 

18     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

frontier country under conditions that indelibly impressed them-

selves on his mind. His locale was changed at least seven times

during the first twenty-five years of his life, the change taking

him back and forth from a farm on the Ohio River in Indiana

to a farm near Columbus, Ohio; from the farm near Columbus

to Columbus itself, where he attended the Capital University

Grammar School and worked for that common training place of

little-schooled, early, mid-western writers, a daily newspaper;

from there to Kenyon College, the history of which Piatt de-

scribed so well in How the Bishop Built His College in the

Woods; from this small, typical, mid-western frontier college

he went to the vast plains of Illinois, where he helped settle and

make a prairie farm; from thence after a visit to Chicago, he

went to Louisville, Kentucky, to work for Prentice (typical, too,

because he had come from the East to make himself, as editor of

the Louisville Journal, a powerful, civilizing, and much respected

influence in the growing, developing, Boone country), editor of

a newspaper which, besides being politically influential, encour-

aged young writers, especially poets of the region. Piatt's work

as secretary to the editor and as contributor to the Journal was

the final step in a preparation not unusual in a pioneer existence

and yet a preparation which offered a splendid background of the

time and the place where he lived and which he represented in

his best poetry.

Piatt's literary career has been followed from his first

rather timid adventure in authorship--the collaboration with

Howells in The Poems of Two Friends, a first book for two

Ohioans with much the same training and inclinations but whose

careers veered far apart: Howells to become an important liter-

ary influence for a quarter of a century as writer and critic, but

not until he had left behind him much, of the frontier influence

which clung to his boyhood and which was revived only in the

autobiographical books of his old age; Piatt to become the writer

of many poems expressing the spirit of the frontier but lacking

that certain quality which would make him rank with the best

American poets.

During the twenty-two years following the publication of

• 18
 

JOHN JAMES PIATT                          19

The Poems of Two Friends, Piatt produced practically all his

best work, came in contact with the most important American

writers then alive, and worked for the Federal Government, for

newspapers, or for his own literary advancement.

His reputation, after an auspicious beginning, reached a point

where many of the leading magazines reviewed his books, but

there his popularity stopped. Many of his books went through a

second edition, and that there was a sustained market for his

books is shown by his frequent publication of new volumes--at

least of volumes with new names. Too often his work is mild

and flat, but although all his poetry is not worth saving, the

judgment of posterity should be not to discard the good with the

bad. A thorough student of the period and section of American

literature which he represents cannot wisely ignore some of his

work.   He knew whereof he spoke.       He not only was articulate,

a quality few frontiersmen could claim, but he also read widely.

Recent as well as older works on American literary history

recognize him.

The best estimate of Piatt that has been found is the fol-

lowing:

He was a classicist who caught the new vision and sought to com-

promise. Everywhere is his work a blending of the new and the old; the

Western spirit that would voice the new notes of the Wabash rather than

echo the old music of the Thames, that syren melody that had been the

undoing of Taylor and Stoddard. In all his volumes conventional work like

"Rose and Root," "The Sunshine of Shadows," and "The Unheard"' alter-

nates with more original poems native in theme and to a degree native in

spirit, like "The Mower in Ohio," "The Pioneer's 'Chimney," "Fires in

Illinois," and "Riding to Vote." There is no dialect, no straining for

realistic effect, no sentimentality. In all that makes for art the poems have

little for criticism: they are classical and finished and beautiful. But they

lack life. There is nothing about them that grips the reader's heart, nothing

that fixes itself in the memory, no single line that has distinction of phrase.

Even in the Western poems like "The Mower in Ohio" there is no sharp-

ness, no atmosphere, no feeling of reality. It is art rather than life; it

is a conscious effort to make a poem. The case is typical. With the

criticism one may sweep away once for all great areas of the poetry of the

time.34

In a way Piatt was a transitional figure struggling with the

Victorian influence which hung over him, and which tended to

34 Fred Lewis Pattee, History of American Literature, since 1870 (New York,

1916), 328-24.

• 19
 

20      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

devitalize his poetry. Nevertheless, in spite of eastern and

European influence, Piatt broke forth occasionally in a poem

which caught the spirit of his native soil. We have in his work

something definitely indigenous to the Ohio Valley, the drama,

the fever, the poetry of railroads, the bleakness and also the

beauty of cold winters in isolated homes. He was, in his early

writing, a little ahead of the drift to realism. As he grew older,

the drift passed far beyond him. He was an authentic voice of

the middle-western frontier; not a loud, compelling voice, but one

that sometimes made statements which are worth remembering.

 

SONNET--IN      186235

Stern be the Pilot in the dreadful hour

When a great nation, like a ship at sea

With the wroth breakers whitening at her lee,

Feels her last shudder if her Helmsman cower;

A godlike manhood be his mighty dower!

Such and so gifted, Lincoln, may'st thou be

With thy high wisdom's low simplicity

And awful tenderness of voted power:

From our hot records then thy name shall stand

On Time's calm ledger out of passionate days--

With the pure debt of gratitude begun

And only paid in never-ending praise--

One of the many of a mighty Land

Made by God's providence the Anointed One.

TORCH-LIGHT IN FALL-TIME36

I lift this sumach-bough with crimson flare

And, touch'd with subtle pangs of dreamy pain,

Through the dark wood a torch I seem to bear

In Autumn's funeral train.

 

THE MOWER IN OHIO37

(June, MDCCCLXIV.)

The bees in the clover are making honey, and I am making my hay:

The air is fresh, I seem to draw a young man's breath today.

The bees and I are alone in the grass: the air is so very still

I hear the dam, so loud, that shines beyond the sullen mill.

Yes, the air is so still that I hear almost the sounds I can not hear--

That, when no other sound is plain, ring in my empty ear:

35 Piatt, Western Windows, 178.

36 Ibid., 106.

37 Piatt, Idylls and Lyrics of the Ohio Valley, 27-82. Cf. with Walt Whitman's

"Come up from the Fields," or James Whitcomb Riley's "The Old Man and Jim."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T

• 20
 

JOHN JAMES PIATT                          21

 

The chime of striking scythes, the fall of the heavy swaths they

sweep--

They ring about me, resting, when I waver half asleep;

So still I am not sure if a cloud, low down, unseen there be,

Or if something brings a rumor home of the cannon so far from me:

Far away in Virginia where Joseph and Grant, I know,

Will tell them what I meant when first I had my mowers gol

Joseph, he is my eldest one, the only boy of my three

Whose shadow can darken my door again, and lighten my heart

for me.

Joseph, he is my eldest--how his scythe was striking ahead!

William was better at shorter heats, but Jo in the long-run led.

William, he was my youngest; John, between them, I somehow see,

When my eyes are shut, with a little board at his head in Tennessee.

But William came home one morning early, from Gettysburg, last

July,

(The mowing was over already, although the only mower was I:)

William, my captain, came home for good to his mother; and I'll

be bound

We were proud and cried to see the flag that wrapt his coffin around;

For a company from the town came up ten miles with music and gun!

It seemed his country claimed him then--as well as his mother--her

son.

But Joseph is yonder with Grant today, a thousand miles or near,

And only the bees are abroad at work with me in the clover here.

Was it a murmur of thunder I heard that hummed again in the air?

Yet, may be, the cannon are sounding now their Onward to Richmond

there.

But under the beech by the orchard, at noon, I sat an hour it would

seem--

It may be I slept a minute, too, or wavered into a dream.

For I saw my boys, across the field, by the flashes as they went,

Tramping a steady tramp as of old, with the strength in their arms

unspent;

Tramping a steady tramp, they moved like soldiers that march to the

beat

Of music that seems, a part of themselves, to rise and fall with their

feet;

Tramping a steady tramp, they came with flashes of silver that shone,

Every step, from their scythes that rang as if they needed the stone--

• 21
 

22      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY (The field is wide and heavy with grass)--and, coming toward me, they beamed With a shine of light in their faces at once, and--surely I must have dreamed! For I sat alone in the clover-field, the bees were working ahead. There were three in my vision--remember, old man: and what if Joseph were dead But I hope that he and Grant (the flag above them both, to boot,) Will go into Richmond together, no matter which is ahead or afoot! Meantime, alone at the mowing here--an old man somewhat gray-- I must stay at home as long as I can, making, myself, the hay. And so another round--the quail in the orchard whistles blithe;-- But first I'll drink at the spring below, and whet again my scythe. Chart Showing Piatt Ancestry.38 Traceable to Middle Ages in France Frances Van Vlit                                      John Piatt of France, a judge (Mrs. Wykoff)                                         who died in 1760. Frances Margaret Elizabeth                      Daniel Abraham John Jacob Hannah Cook McCullough of                   Captain Jacob Piatt, on Asbury, New Jersey, who                          General George Washing- owned the first carriage in                        ton's staff, an original Asbury.                                                    member of the Society of the Cincinnati. Captain William Piatt--In Rev- Sarah Smith of Somerset                                 olutionary War, original County, New Jersey.                                member of Society of the Cincinnati. Killed at St. Clair's Defeat, November 4, 1791. 38 This chart was compiled from information taken from the following sources: Venable, op. cit., 166; Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society Publications (Columbus, 1887-), XIII (1904) 555; Elizabeth Budd McCullough Smith and Caroline Piatt Morrison, A Memorial Biography: Benjamin M. Piatt and Elizabeth, His Wife (Washington, 1887); and Miss Juliet Bertha Piatt, Mac-a-Check Castle, West Liberty, Ohio.

• 22
 

JOHN JAMES PIATT     23 Frances          Jemima                                           William F.    James Rachel Bear                                                           Captain James Piatt, in War of 1812. Emily Scott                                                             John Bear Piatt Sarah Morgan Bryan                                            John James Piatt Marian       Victor     Guy                                      Cecil    Dougal      Donn Chronological Bibliography of the Works of John James Piatt. Books After each book are listed the libraries that have been visited by the author of this paper, where the books can be found. The following abbreviations are used: Antioch College Library, Yellow Springs, Ohio .......Ant. Cincinnati Public Library, Cincinnati, Ohio...........Cin. Dayton Public Library, Dayton, Ohio ............... Day. Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina.... Duke Greene County Public Library, Xenia, Ohio.........Greene Library of Congress, Washington, D. C............Cong. Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society Library, Columbus, Ohio  ............................... Arch. Starred titles were not located, nor could the name and loca- tion of the publisher be found. Poems of Two Friends (with William    Dean Howells), Columbus, Ohio, Follett, Foster and Company, 1860 [Cin., Arch.]. The Nests at Washington and Other Poems (with Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt). New York, Walter Low, 1864 [Cin., Cong.]. Poems in Sunshine and Firelight. Cincinnati, R. W. Carroll and Company, 1866 [Cin., Cong., Arch.]. Western Windows and Other Poems (also known as Poems). Cincinnati, R. W. Carroll and Company, 1868; New York, Hurd

• 23
 

24     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

and Houghton; Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1872,

1877; London, Trubner and Company [Cin., Cong., Arch.].

*The Pioneer's Chimney and Other Poems. 1871.

Landmarks and Other Poems. New       York, Hurd and

Houghton, 1872;  Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1871,

1877 [Cin., Day., Duke, Cong., Arch.].

Poems of George D. Prentice; ed. with a Biographical Sketch

by John James Piatt. Cincinnati, Robert Clarke and Company,

1876, 1877, 1878, 1883 [Cin., Duke, Cong., Arch.].

May Festival, 1878; Ode for the Opening of the Cincinnati

Music Hall. Cincinnati, Robert Clarke and Company, 1878

[Cong.].

Poems of House and Home (also known as A Dream of

Church Windows). New York, Hurd and Houghton, 1878;

Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1879; Cambridge,

Massachusetts, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888 [Cin.,

Day., Duke, Cong., Arch.].

Pencilled Fly-leaves: A Book of Essays in Town and Coun-

try. Cincinnati, Robert Clarke and Company, 1880 [Cin., Duke,

Cong., Arch.].

The Union of American Poetry and Art; ed. by John James

Piatt. Cincinnati, W. E. Dibble, 1880. 2v. [Cin., Cong., Duke].

Idyls and Lyrics of the Ohio Valley. Cincinnati, W. E.

Dibble, 1881; Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and

Company, 1888 [Cin., Day., Cong., Arch.].

The Children Out-of-doors by Two in One House (with

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt). Cincinnati, Robert Clarke and

Company, 1885 [Cin., Cong.].

At the Holy Well with a Handful of New Verses. Dublin,

N. H. Gill and Son, 1887; Cork, D. Muleahy and Company;

Cincinnati, Robert Clarke and Company; London, Simpkin, Mar-

chall and Company [Cin., Cong.].

A Book of Gold and Other Sonnets. London, Elliot Stock,

1889 [Cong.].

A Return to Paradise and Other Fly-leaf Essays in Town

and Country. London, Elliot Stock, 1891 [Cin.].

• 24
 

JOHN JAMES PIATT                    25

*The Lost Hunting Ground. 1893.

*Little New World Idyls. 1893.

*The Ghost's Entry and Other Poems. 1895.

Odes in Ohio and Other Poems. Cincinnati, Robert Clarke

and Company, 1897.

The Hesperian Tree; ed. by John James Piatt. Three

Rivers Elm, North Bend, Ohio, John Scott and Company, 1900;

Columbus, Ohio, S. F. Harriman, 1903 [Ant., Cin., Day., Duke,

Greene, Arch.].

How the Bishop Built His College in the Woods. Cincin-

nati, The Western Literary Press [1906], [Cin., Cong.].

The Swallow-flight Series. Three Rivers Elm, North Bend,

Ohio, John Scott and Company [1906]. [This series is composed

of single poems, each printed in a small book with very attractive

binding and illustrations.]

Midland, a Fortnightly Magazine; ed. by John James Piatt

and E. J. Wohlgemuth. October, 1907, to January, 1908 [Cong.].

Contributions to Magazines

"The Morning Street," in Atlantic Monthly, III (February,

1859), 150.

"The Old Man and the Leaves," in Harper's Monthly Maga-

zine, XXII (March, 1861), 528.

"The Bronze Statue," in Harper's Monthly Magazine, XXIV

(March, 1862), 521.

"The Master Key," in Harper's Monthly Magazine, XXVI

(April, 1863), 699.

"The Lost Genius," in Atlantic Monthly, XX (August,

1867), 288.

"The Outside of the Window," in Harper's Monthly Maga-

zine, XLVIII (March, 1874), 578.

"The Moth," in Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV (August, 1874),

167.

"One behind Time," in Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV (Octo-

ber, 1874),  422.

"Forceythe Willson" (biography and criticism), in Atlantic

Monthly, XXXV (March, 1875), 332-44.

• 25
 

26     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

"Quick and Dead," in Atlantic Monthly, XXXVI (Decem-

ber, 1875), 721.

"The Ghost's Entry," in Harper's Monthly Magazine, LII

(January, 1876), 271.

"Mr. Stedman's Poetry" (criticism), in Atlantic Monthly,

XLI (March, 1878), 313-9.

"Flower in a Book," in Atlantic Monthly, XLII (December,

1878), 768.

"The Children Out-of-doors," in Atlantic Monthly, XLIV

(July, 1879), 97.

"Letter of Regret" for absence from Holmes' seventieth

birthday anniversary dinner given by the Atlantic Monthly to its

contributors, in Atlantic Monthly, XLVI (November, 1879),

supplement, 21.

"The Guerdon," in Atlantic Monthly, XLIX (January,

1882), 30.

"At Kilcolman Castle," in Atlantic Monthly, XC (November,

1902), 702.

Manuscript Material

Duke University has seventeen letters from John James

Piatt to Colonel Paul Hamilton Hayne and his wife, in the Paul

Hamilton Hayne Manuscript Collection. Dr. Lewis Chase, of

Washington, D. C., has the original of a letter to a Miss Myers,

dated February 10, 1881. Mr. Cecil Piatt, the poet's son, of 55

Cedar Street, New York, N. Y., is reputed to possess most of the

original manuscript material.

• 26