Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912. Vol. 1 of 2

AMELIA B. WELBY

Mrs. Amelia B. Welby, Kentucky's most famous female poet of the mid-century, was born at St. Michael's, Maryland, February 3, 1819. When she was fifteen years old her family removed to Louisville, Kentucky, the city of her fame. In 1837, George D. Prentice, with his wonderful nose for finding female verse-makers, added Amelia to his already long and ever-increasing list. He printed her first poem in his Journal, and crowned her as the finest branch of his poetical tree. His declaration that she possessed the divine afflatus meant nothing, as he had said the same thing about many another sentimental single lady, pining upon the peaks of poesy. But Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus W. Griswold soon separated her from the versifiers and placed her among the poets, and thus her fame has come down to us with fragrance. In June, 1838, Amelia was married to George Welby, a Louisville merchant, who also held her to be a poet born in the purple. Mrs. Welby's verse became well-known and greatly admired in many parts of the country, and, in response to numerous requests for a volume of her work, she collected her Journal verse and published it under the title of Poems by Amelia (Boston, 1845). A second edition was published the following year, and by 1860 the volume was said to be in its seventeenth edition! Robert W. Weir's illustrated edition of her poems was issued in 1850, and this is the most desirable form in which her work has been preserved. These various editions will at once convey some idea of her great popularity. With Poe, Prentice, and Griswold singing her praises, and the public purchasing her poems as rapidly as they could be made into books, Amelia's fame seemed secure. To-day, however, no one has read any of her verse save The Rainbow, which has been set down as her best poem, and she has become essentially an historical personage, the keepsake of Kentucky letters. While the greater number of her poems are quite unreadable, her elegy for Miss Laura M. Thurston, a sister versifier, is well done and her finest piece of work. Mrs. Welby died at Louisville, May 3, 1852, when but thirty-three years of age. Had she lived longer, and the poetic appreciation of the American people suffered no change, the heights to which she would have attained can be but vaguely guessed at.

Bibliography. Female Poets of America, by R. W. Griswold (Philadelphia, 1856); The Poets and Poetry of the West, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, 1860).

THE RAINBOW

[From Poems by Amelia (Boston, 1845)]

I sometimes have thoughts, in my loneliest hours,
That lie on my heart like the dew on the flowers,
Of a ramble I took one bright afternoon
When my heart was as light as a blossom in June;
The green earth was moist with the late fallen showers,
The breeze fluttered down and blew open the flowers,
While a single white cloud, to its haven of rest
On the white-wing of peace, floated off in the west.

As I threw back my tresses to catch the cool breeze,
That scattered the rain-drops and dimpled the seas,
Far up the blue sky a fair rainbow unrolled
Its soft-tinted pinions of purple and gold.
'Twas born in a moment, yet, quick as its birth
It had stretched to the uttermost ends of the earth,
And, fair, as an angel, it floated as free,
With a wing on the earth and a wing on the sea.

How calm was the ocean! how gentle its swell!
Like a woman's soft bosom it rose and it fell;
While its light sparkling waves, stealing laughingly o'er,
When they saw the fair rainbow, knelt down on the shore.
No sweet hymn ascended, no murmur of prayer,
Yet I felt that the spirit of worship was there,
And bent my young head, in devotion and love,
'Neath the form of the angel, that floated above.

How wide was the sweep of its beautiful wings!
How boundless its circle! how radiant its rings!
If I looked on the sky, 'twas suspended in air;
If I looked on the ocean, the rainbow was there;
Thus forming a girdle, as brilliant and whole
As the thoughts of the rainbow, that circled my soul.
Like the wing of the Deity, calmly unfurled,
It bent from the cloud and encircled the world.

There are moments, I think, when the spirit receives
Whole volumes of thought on its unwritten leaves,
When the folds of the heart in a moment unclose
Like the innermost leaves from the heart of a rose.
And thus, when the rainbow had passed from the sky,
The thoughts it awoke were too deep to pass by;
It left my full soul, like the wing of a dove,
All fluttering with pleasure, and fluttering with love.

I know that each moment of rapture or pain
But shortens the links in life's mystical chain;
I know that my form, like that bow from the wave,
Must pass from the earth, and lie cold in the grave;
Yet O! when death's shadows my bosom encloud,
When I shrink at the thought of the coffin and shroud,
May Hope, like the rainbow, my spirit enfold
In her beautiful pinions of purple and gold.

ON THE DEATH OF A SISTER POET

[From The Poets and Poetry of the West, edited by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860)]

She has passed, like a bird, from the minstrel throng,
She has gone to the land where the lovely belong!
Her place is hush'd by her lover's side,
Yet his heart is full of his fair young bride;
The hopes of his spirit are crushed and bowed
As he thinks of his love in her long white shroud;
For the fragrant sighs of her perfumed breath
Were kissed from her lips by his rival—Death.

Cold is her bosom, her thin white arms
All mutely crossed o'er its icy charms,
As she lies, like a statue of Grecian art,
With a marbled brow and a cold hushed heart;
Her locks are bright, but their gloss is hid;
Her eye is sunken 'neath its waxen lid:
And thus she lies in her narrow hall—
Our fair young minstrel—the loved of all.

Light as a bird's were her springing feet,
Her heart as joyous, her song as sweet;
Yet never again shall that heart be stirred
With its glad wild songs like a singing bird:
Ne'er again shall the strains be sung,
That in sweetness dropped from her silver tongue;
The music is o'er, and Death's cold dart
Hath broken the spell of that free, glad heart.

Often at eve, when the breeze is still,
And the moon floats up by the distant hill,
As I wander alone 'mid the summer bowers,
And wreathe my locks with the sweet wild flowers,
I will think of the time when she lingered there,
With her mild blue eyes and her long fair hair;
I will treasure her name in my bosom-core;
But my heart is sad—I can sing no more.

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