Thomas H. Shreve, poet and journalist, was born at Alexandria, Virginia, in 1808. In early life he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and entered mercantile pursuits. In 1834 Shreve became a Cincinnati editor; but four years later he returned to Louisville to again engage in business. Throughout his business career, Shreve was a constant contributor of poems and prose sketches to the best magazines. He finally abandoned business for literature, and he at once became associate editor of the Louisville Journal. He was not a rugged journalist of the Prentice type, but a cultured and chaste essayist who should have written from his study window, rather than from such a seething hothouse of sarcasm and invective as Prentice maintained. He was a mild-mannered man, a Quaker, who spent his last months on earth in crossing swords with Thomas Babington Macaulay concerning the character of William Penn. In 1851 Shreve's Drayton, an American Tale, was issued by the Harpers at New York. This work won the author much praise in the East as well as in the West, and it started him upon an honorable career, which was soon cut short by disease. Thomas H. Shreve died at Louisville, December 23, 1853. Prentice penned a splendid tribute to the memory of his dead friend and associate; and some years later a collection of his verse was made as a fitting memorial of his blameless life and literary labors.

Bibliography. The Poets and Poetry of the West, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); History of Kentucky, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); The Shreve Family, by L. P. Allen (Greenfield, Illinois).

I HAVE NO WIFE

[From The Knickerbocker Magazine (August, 1838)]