Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/681

JOHN J. PIATT. John James Piatt was born on the first day of March, in the year 1835, at a village now called Milton, four miles from Rising Sun, Indiana. His early boyhood was spent on a farm, but his parents, John Bear and Emily Scott Piatt, having re- moved to Ohio, in the vicinity of its Capital, John J. was apprenticed to Charles Scott, then publisher of the Ohio State Journal. He there learned the printing business, enjoying irregular opportunities for the acquisition of " a little Latin and less Greek," at the Columbus High School and at Kenyon College. He has been known as a poet about eight years, but not widely until 1858, when several poems, written by him for the Louisville Journal, were warmly commended and republished by many influential papers. In 1859 he became a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and his poem, "The Morning Street," was ascribed to poets who deservedly have national reputations. In the early part of the year 1860, Follett, Foster and Company published a neat du- odecimo volume of one hundred and thirty-two pages, entitled " Poems of Two Friends " — Mr. Piatt and "William D. Howells acknowledged the friendship and the poems of the volume. It was noticed with flattering encouragement by leading journalists not only in the West but in eastern cities. We cannot better characterize Mr. Piatt's merits as a poet or the promise of the volume than by making the following quotation from a notice in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1860 : The volume is a very agreeable one, with little of the crudeness so generally characteristic of first ventures, — not more than enough to augur richer maturity hereafter. Dead-ripeness in a first book is a fatal symptom, sure sign that the writer is doomed forever to that pale limbo of faultless- ness from which there is no escape upward or downward. We can scarce find it in our hearts to make any distinctions in so happy a partnership ; but while we see something more than promise in both writers, we have a feeling that Mr. Piatt shows greater originality in the choice of subjects. . . . Both of them seem to us to have escaped remarkably from the prevailing conventionalisms of verse, and to write meter because they had a genuine call thereto. We are pleased with a thorough West- ern flavor in some of the poems. We welcome cordially a volume in which we recognize a fresh and authentic power, and expect confidently of the writers a yet higher achievement ere long. The poems give more than glimpses of a faculty not so common that the world can afford to do with- out it. THE STRANGE ORGANIST— A PRELUDE. Deep in the strange Cathedral gloom. Where incense all the ages rose, I stand alone. The mystic bloom Of saintful silence round me glows. High Church of Song! The hallowed place Where haunt the hymns of bards of old! Above the organ Shakspeare's face I dream — hear Milton's soul outrolled. ( 665 )