Yearning to hold him again to her heart:
There he lies—with the blue eyes dim,
And smiling, child-like lips apart.
Tenderly bury the fair young dead,
Pausing to drop on his grave a tear,
Carve on the wooden slab at his head,
“Somebody’s darling lies buried here!”
SARAH DOUDNEY
(1843–1926)
“THE LESSON OF THE WATER-MILL,” widely reprinted in America and England from 1870 to 1900, was a favorite of professional reciters. It is still found in anthologies of popular verse. The author, Sarah Doudney, was a London writer who first published her famous poem in 1864 in The Children’s Family Magazine, and later in her volume of poetry Psalms of Life (1871).
In 1870 Scottish-born Daniel Craig McCallum (1815–1875) privately published in Brooklyn a book titled The Water-Mill and Other Poems. It included Doudney’s poem, slightly altered for the worse, with an added stanza as dreadful as all the other poems in the book. McCallum was an Erie Railway superintendent living in Oswego, New York, who had served for the North in the Civil War as a major-general. Perhaps he thought “The Water-Mill” was his own work because he had tinkered with it.
I was amazed to discover how completely Doudney has vanished from reference books on British writers. You won’t find her in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, or in British Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Yet in the Supplement to Alibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature (1891) there is a long entry listing forty-one of her books, including novels, short stories and verse. As she was then still living, no doubt her final bibliography is even longer. I know nothing about the water-mills of her life.
I own an old undated scrapbook in which are pasted down poems that appeared in a newspaper called The Globe, for a series titled “Poems You Ought to Know.” Accompanying “The Lesson of the Water-Mill” is a letter Doudney sent to The Globe telling how she wrote the poem:
I wrote “The Lesson of the Water-Mill” when I was about 16. One day I was sitting in a bay-window, overlooking a road in Portsmouth, and turning the pages of a scrapbook to amuse a child. Suddenly I came upon a picture of a water-mill, and under the engraving was the proverb, “The mill cannot grind with the water that is past.” I had never seen a water-mill. My birthplace was near the sea and I knew very little of river scenery. But when the child had gone away and I was left alone, I thought about the picture and the proverb. And so the song was written, singing itself into my head, as all my songs have done. While I copy the lines for the Globe my thoughts go back to the days when they were written, and I call up a vision of my mother’s face, bright with sympathy when she heard my verses. Now I am left alone, living very near my birthplace, on the road which leads from Portsmouth to London. The poem first appeared in the Churchman’s Family Magazine Many years ago, long after the publication of the poem, Mr. Irving Bishop, the thought reader, visited London and saw the lines in my collection of verses, Psalms of Life. He had already bought the copyright of the poem from Mr. McCallum, who claimed the authorship. I met Mr. Bishop and proved my own claim to his entire satisfaction.
Many anthologies of the 1880s reprinted Doudney’s poem, falsely crediting it to McCallum. I will cite only two that I own: The Beautiful, the Wonderful, and the Wise (1883), edited by L. N. Chapin, and Star of Progress (1888), edited by H. W. Smith.
The Lesson of the Water-Mill
Listen to the water-mill;
Through the livelong day,
How the clicking of its wheel
Wears the hours away!
Languidly the autumn wind,
Stirs the forest leaves,
From the field the reapers sing,
Binding up their sheaves;
And a proverb haunts my mind
As a spell is cast—
“The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past.”
Autumn winds revive no more
Leaves that once are shed,
And the sickle cannot reap
Corn once gathered;
Flows the ruffled streamlet on,
Tranquil, deep, and still;
Never gliding back again
To the water-mill;
Truly speaks the proverb old
With a meaning vast—
“The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past.”
Take the lesson to thyself,
True and loving heart;
Golden youth is fleeting by,
Summer hours depart;
Learn to make the most of life,
Lose no happy day;
Time will never bring thee back
Chances swept away!
Leave no tender word unsaid,
Love while love shall last—
“The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past.”
Work while yet the daylight shines,
Man of strength and will!
Never does the streamlet glide
Useless by the mill;
Wait not till to-morrow’s sun
Beams upon thy way,
All that thou canst call thine own
Lies in thy “To-day”;
Power, intellect and health
May not always last—
“The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past.”
Oh, the wasted hours of life
That have drifted by!
Oh, the good that might have been—
Lost, without a sigh!
Love that we might once have saved
By a single word,
Thoughts conceived, but never penned,
Perishing unheard;—
Take the proverb to thine heart,
Take, and hold it fast—
“The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past.”
THOMAS DUNN ENGLISH
(1819–1902)
WHEN I WAS a boy I thought “Ben Bolt” was about a woman with the curious name of Alice Ben Bolt, not knowing a comma separated Alice from Ben. I doubt if anyone sings the lyrics these days, though I once heard Isaac Asimov, who had a fine singing voice, belt out all the verses.
“Ben Bolt” was not written as a song, but as a poem. It appeared in the New York Mirror in September 1843. The author, Thomas English, was then only 24. Born in Philadelphia of Irish Quaker parents, he tried his hand at both medicine and law before settling on a career as writer and journalist. (His M.D. thesis at the University of Pennsylvania had been a defense of phrenology.)
In New York City he edited two failed periodicals, the Aurora and the Aristidean. Back in Philadelphia, his weekly humor magazine John Donkey also soon bit the dust. Turning to politics, he became the first mayor of Lawnsville (now Logan), Virginia, and later served on the New Jersey legislature. He was a Democratic member of Congress from 1891 to 1895.
English wrote several novels, and some fifty plays of which only one, The Mormons; or, Life at Salt Lake (1858), was published. Select Poems of Dr. Thomas Dunn English appeared in 1894. He and Edgar Allan Poe were at first friends, then turned bitter enemies when English accused Poe of forgery. “He is not alone thoroughly unprincipled, base and depraved,” wrote English, “but silly, vain and ignorant—not alone an assassin in morals, but a quack in literature.” Poe called him Thomas Done Brown. When Poe sued the New York Evening Mirror, in which English’s remarks had appeared, he was awarded $225.06 in damages.
After Nelson Kneass set “Ben Bolt” to a German air, it became one of the most loved songs of America and England. “Maudlin sentimentality was the prevailing, the indispensable, note in the popular songs of that epoch,” writes Burton E. Stevenson in a chapter on “Ben Bolt” in Famous Single Poems, “but ‘Ben Bolt’ outmaudlined the worst of them.” Its popularity was fading when in 1894 it was revived by a prominent mention in George du Maurier’s best-selling novel Trilby. The Oxford Companion to English Literat
ure says it was set to music no less than 26 times, once by English himself. (If you listen closely, you can hear Vivien Leigh/Scarlett Butler sing, “Oh she wept with delight when he gave her a smile / And trembled with fear at his frown.”)
It is one of the great ironies of literary history that all of English’s novels, plays and poems are now totally forgotten except for what Stevenson calls the “metrical indiscretion of his youth.” That, he adds, “was the awful fate which English had unthinkingly brought upon himself.”
Many parodies of “Ben Bolt” were written. Here is the first stanza of “Joe Jones” that I found in The Speaker’s Garland, 2, no. 7 (1874):
Don’t you remember lame Sally, Joe Jones—
Lame Sally, whose nose was so brown?
Who looked like a clam if you gave her a smile,
And went into fits at your frown?
In the old goose-pond in the orchard, Joe Jones,
Where the goslings are learning to swim,
Lame Sally went fishing one wet, windy day,
And there by mistake tumbled in.
In a little booklet titled Good Old-Time Songs, No. 4 (1916), I found two anonymous sequels to English’s poem, both of which follow.
Ben Bolt
Don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,—
Sweet Alice whose hair was so brown,
Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile,
And trembled with fear at your frown?
In the old churchyard in the valley, Ben Bolt,
In a corner obscure and alone,
They have fitted a slab of the granite so gray,
And Alice lies under the stone.
Under the hickory tree, Ben Bolt,
Which stood at the foot of the hill,
Together we’ve lain in the noonday shade,
And listened to Appleton’s mill.
The mill-wheel has fallen to pieces, Ben Bolt,
The rafters have tumbled in,
And a quiet which crawls round the walls as you gaze
Has followed the olden din.
Do you mind of the cabin of logs, Ben Bolt,
At the edge of the pathless wood,
And the button-ball tree5 with its motley limbs,
Which nigh by the doorstep stood?
The cabin to ruin has gone, Ben Bolt,
The tree you would seek for in vain;
And where once the lords of the forest waved,
Are grass and the golden grain.
And don’t you remember the school, Ben Bolt,
With the master so cruel and grim,
And the shaded nook in the running brook
Where the children went to swim?
Grass grows on the master’s grave, Ben Bolt,
The spring of the brook is dry,
And of all the boys who were schoolmates then
There are only you and I.
There is change in the things I loved, Ben Bolt,
They have changed from the old to the new;
But I feel in the depths of my spirit the truth,
There never was change in you.
Twelvemonths twenty have passed, Ben Bolt,
Since first we were friends—yet I hail
Your presence a blessing, your friendship a truth,
Ben Bolt of the salt-sea gale!
Ben Bolt’s Reply (Anonymous)
Oh, yes, I remember her name with delight,
Sweet Alice, so cherished and dear;
I seek her grave in the pale hour of night,
And moisten the turf with a tear.
And when the heart is o’erburdened with woes
I wander and muse all alone,
And long for the time when my heart shall repose
Where sweet Alice lies, under the stone.
I roam through the woods where so joyous we’ve strayed,
And recline on the green, sunny hill;
All things are bright in that beautiful glade,
But my heart is all lonely and chill.
The hand that so fondly I pressed in my own,
And the lips that were melting with love,
Are cold in the grave and I am left all alone,
Till I meet with sweet Alice above.
Ah, well I remember the school-house and brook,
And the master so kind and so true;
The wild, blooming flowers in the cool, shady nook,
As fragrant with incense and dew;
But I weep not for thee, though so dear to my heart,
Or the friends that have left me alone,
The bosom will heave, and the teardrop start,
For sweet Alice lies under the stone.
Ben Bolt’s Grave (Anonymous)
By the side of sweet Alice they have laid Ben Bolt,
Where oft he longed to repose;
For there he would kneel with the early spring flowers,
And plant on his darling the rose.
His heart was as true as the star to his gaze
When tossed on the billows alone,
But now it is cold and forever at rest,
For he calmly lies under the stone.
At last he is gone to the bright spirit lands,
And free from all sorrow and pain;
He tastes the full rapture of angels above
To meet with sweet Alice again.
We gather the flowers from the green, shady brook,
And moss from the silent old mill,
To strew o’er the grave where now doth repose
The hearts that death hardly could chill.
And oft when the soul has grown weary and sad
We come by twilight alone
To muse o’er the spot where together Ben Bolt
And sweet Alice lie under the stone.
JAMES THOMAS FIELDS
(1817–1881)
HAILING FROM Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Fields co-founded Ticknor and Fields, a distinguished Boston publishing house. After the firm bought the Atlantic Monthly, Fields followed James Russell Lowell as editor. Fields (twice a widower) ran a famous Boston literary salon with his third wife Annie, longtime friend and companion of writer Sarah Orne Jewett. The salon plays a major role in Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England.
Of his many poems, collected in several volumes, a ballad sometimes titled “The Tempest,” and sometimes “The Captain’s Daughter,” contains the one memorable and oft-quoted line: “ ‘We are lost!’ the Captain shouted, as he staggered down the stairs.” As Merle Johnson points out in You Know These Lines! (1935), the captain, who is in the cabin, should have been on the bridge—and no one who served on a ship would call a ladder “the stairs.”
Fields’s most anthologized poem is the one that follows—a caustic blast at literary critics who are unable to recognize genuine art or poetry.
The Owl-Critic
“Who stuffed that white owl?” No one spoke in the shop:
The barber was busy, and he couldn’t stop;
The customers, waiting their turns, were all reading
The Daily, the Herald, the Post, little heeding
The young man who blurted out such a blunt question;
Not one raised a head, or even made a suggestion;
And the barber kept on shaving.
“Don’t you see, Mister Brown,”
Cried the youth with a frown,
“How wrong the whole thing is,
How preposterous each wing is,
How flattened the head is, how jammed down the neck is—
In short, the whole owl, what an ignorant wreck ’tis!
I make no apology;
I’ve learned owl-eology.
I’ve passed days and nights in a hundred collections,
And cannot be blinded to any deflections
Arising from unskilful fingers that fail
To stuff a bird right, from his beak to his tail.
Mister Brown! Mister Brown!
Do take that
bird down,
Or you’ll soon be the laughing-stock all over town!”
And the barber kept on shaving.
“I’ve studied owls
And other night fowls,
And I tell you
What I know to be true:
An owl cannot roost
With his limbs so unloosed;
No owl in this world
Ever had his claws curled,
Ever had his legs slanted,
Ever had his bill canted,
Ever had his neck screwed
Into that attitude.
He can’t do it, because
’Tis against all bird-laws.
Anatomy teaches,
Ornithology preaches
An owl has a toe
That can’t turn out so!
I’ve made the white owl my study for years,
And to see such a job almost moves me to tears!
Mister Brown, I’m amazed
You should be so gone crazed
As to put up a bird
In that posture absurd!
To look at that owl really brings on a dizziness;
The man who stuffed him don’t half know his business!”
And the barber kept on shaving.
“Examine those eyes.
I’m filled with surprise
Taxidermists should pass
Off on you such poor glass;
So unnatural they seem
They’d make Audubon scream,
And John Burroughs laugh
To encounter such chaff.
Do take that bird down;
Have him stuffed again, Brown!”
And the barber kept on shaving.
Famous Poems from Bygone Days Page 8