Edwin Markham

AUTHOR OF "THE MAN WITH THE HOE."

With an ancestry of legislators, preachers, scientists and other nation-builders extending back to William Penn's first cousin and secretary-Colonel William Markham, Deputy Governor of Pennsylvania-the toiler's friend and poet, Edwin Markham, was born at Oregon City, April 23, 1852. Off for California at the age of five, the fatherless lad lived in the companionship of a stern mother with poetic taste, a deaf brother, and the poems of Byron and Homer-society which would naturally tend to make a peculiar man. Colonial blood; Oregon born; California culture; a teacher and poet; this is Edwin Markham, the author of "The Man With the Hoe."

A recent critic says of Mr. Markham's verse: "One of its distinct features is its breadth of range. This gives it greatness-a greatness unknown to the singers of the flowery way. He breaks open the secret of the poppy; he feels the pain in the bent back of labor; he goes down to the dim places of the dead; he reaches in heart-warm prayer to the Father of Life.”

Another has written: "The salient features of Mr. Markham's poetry are vigorous imagination, picturesqueness of phraseology, and nervous tenseness of style. He is almost always at white heat. He seldom or never sits poised on the calm, ethereal heights of contemplation. He is mightily stirred by his teeming fancies, and his lines are as burning brands."

It warms the heart to read such glowing verses, in which the thoughts are as red coals in an open fire. It is a tremendous relief after the dreary platitudes of the average magazine drivelers, with their wooden echoes of Keats and Wordsworth, to read the lines of a man who has thought out style of his own, and who hurls

his ideas out bravely and loudly. The poem which gives its title to the book was inspired by Millet's well known picture. Mr. Markham's greatest poem is an outcry for the recognition of the wrongs of labor. In the Man with the Hoe he sees the type of the down-trodden workman, and in five stanzas thunders his sermon.

THE MAN WITH THE HOE.

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground.
The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;

To trace the stars and search the heavens for powers;
To feel the passion of Eternity?

Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And pillared the blue firmament with light?

Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf

There is no shape more terrible than this

More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed-
More filled with signs and portents for the soul-

More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him

Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?

What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the red reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

Is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;

Give back the upward looking and the light;

Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Touch it again with immortality;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings-
With those who shaped him to the thing he is-
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of the centuries?

True greatness is measured by one's ability to stamp his impress upon humanity. Mr. Markham would therefore be great if he had done nothing more than to cause the world to pause and consider these four lines written of the servile laborer:

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

People of all nationalities clearly see in these words the man with a hoe as painted by Millet and described by Markham; and, as suggested by a Western lady, they have not entirely overlooked the woman with the washtub and broom. Hence as a result of the thought he has awakened there is a demand for greater intelligence in the humbler pursuits of honorable industry. The world now wants to know if that "emptiness of ages" really exists in the face of honest labor; for if it does exist there, the same world will correct it, and that upon the inspiration of Edwin Markham, the Poet of Brooklyn, who delights to be remembered as a native Oregonian.

Mrs. Ella Higginson

One of the prettiest little valleys the homeseeker chanced to find in the early days of Oregon, was an amphitheater excavated in the Blue Moun'ains, a thousand feet deep. Every passer-by has noticed its symmetry, remarked its beauty, been inspired by its grandeur, and longed to linger within its great rugged walls. Clear atmosphere, lofty sky, sublimity and sunshine--save when the black storm-cloud angrily crawls up close behind Mount Emily, and with thundering threats sends the stampeding herds nell-mell into the 'deep canyons, to hide from winds that sway the fir, the tamarack, and the pine. It is one of those places where the heavens fit down so closely over the mountain rim that the valley and the heavens seem to make up the whole world. In fact, it is world enough for those who live there. Nature made it the abode of home-building, progress, and contentment; and the immigrants who settled there seldom have left it to return to the land whence they came.

Once, according to an ancient legend, some Frenchmen traveled that way, and, having ascended a ridge where the old emigrant road peeped over the crest, at the vision lying ahead, suddenly exclaimed "Grand Ronde!" It was in the month of May, and the first view of the picturesque valley broke in upon them at a time when that spot of emerald, hidden away in the Blue Mountains, waves like a summer sea-a time when the lightning begins to sparkle on the minarets above, and a hundred thermal springs steadily send up clouds of hot steam, rarefying the lower atmosphere and inviting the cool, exhilarating breezes from the high snowcliffs of the Powder River Range. Such was the scene that inspired the Frenchmen to exclaim "Grand Ronde," a a name which the geographers have been repeating ever since, a name which will be perpetuated in prose and in song,