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The
Golden Age.
VOLUHT. THREE
7IUHSER TWELVE
‘BIOPSIS AND ITS AUTHOR:
E present to our readers this week one
of the greatest unknown poems in the
English language. We say “unknown”
00
because “Biopsis” has not yet been
accorded a place among the “mountain
peaks” of poetic thought and expres
sion. And yet we have never seen a
scholar read it for the first time with
out asking with astonishment and en-
thusiasm: “How is it that such a master poem
and its author are so little known in the literary
world? ’ ’
When the writer published his book, “Echoes
from a Recluse” as his literary firstling in 1893 he
asked Tom F. Mcßeath (who is now superintendent
of Public Schools at Gainesville, Fla.) for the
privilege of incorporating in the supplement in a
department called “The Author’s Favorites” four
of the best poems of this comparatively unknown
genius—“Biopsis,” “Carmen Artati,” “Christmas
Bells” and “A Southern Girl.”
In order that our readers may the better appre
ciate this wonderful poem, we reproduce here the
personal sketch as it appeared in that book fifteen
years ago.
Story of the Author.
Born in the mountains of Wayne county, Ky., then
seventy-five miles from the railroad, Tom F. Mc-
Beath was brought up on a farm, acquiring only a
common school education, but learning his grandest
lessons of instruction and inspiration, as he tells
us, from the “open book of Nature” before him,
the towering Cumberland Mountains that shut him
in, and all the minstrelsy of the picturesque wood
land where, in boyhood, he loved so well to medi
tate or roam.
At the age of twenty-seven he found himself on
board the first railroad train he ever saw, with $34
in his pocket, bound for college. He determined
that if he could not find away open he would make
one. He sought and obtained work at school to
help pay his.way. He rented a room (or one-fourth
of it, rather), at 12 1-2 cents a week, and for
nearly two years lived on baker’s bread, molasses
and water, at a cost of 35 cents a week. At the
end of three years he graduated with two diplomas,
as the valedictorian of his class, and today is one
of the most accomplished scholars in America.
He had written much, he says, but published
little; and in 1888, while President of the Cooper
Normal College, at Daleville, Miss., he began the
preparation of three books for publication, when
the building took fire and all his literary produc
tions, the accumulation of nearly twenty years, were
burned to ashes. I’ll declare, it makes mewant to
cry for him and humanity. It seems to me I would
rather have had a million dollars burned up; for if
those books of prose and poems, had been at all in
keeping with what we have seen of his works, they
would have won for him almost, if not quite, the
ATLANTA, GA., MAY »908.
first place in American literature, and blessed the
world as long as language lives.
This unspeakable and irreparable misfortune of
his makes me doubly anxious to perpetuate here,
as far as possible, the poems that follow, feeling
sure that all who read and study them well, will
count themselves debtor to me for giving them to
them.
“Biopsis”—What shall I say of it? Perhaps I
would better not speak at all, for I cannot speak
as I would and should. “Biopsis” loses nothing,
and, in fact, I believe it gains when compared with
Bryant’s “ Thana topsis,” applauded the world
around. Do you smile at my enthusiasm? Then
read the two pieces, studiously compare them, and
judge for yourself.
“Thanatopsis,” as a treatise on “Death,” is
sublime, in expression, and appeals to the admiration
of the philologist, while it smiles defiance at the
rhetorician’s merciless chisel; but “Biopsis,”
pulsing with its glorious thoughts on “Life,” stirs
the heart and fires and refreshes the thirsting soul
as “Thanatopsis” does not and cannot do.
The venerable and gifted T. F. Jeffries, himself a
poet and philosopher, who, as the saying goes,
“has read everything,” believes “Biopsis” hardly
lias a superior in the English language; and my
former pastor, Elder A. B. Vaughan, Jr., when he
first read it, said with much warmth: “I’ll declare,
every person who has mind and heart enough to
take in that piece, ought to read it every morning
before breakfast, so he would feel like getting up,
going forth and doing something.” And thus I
feel about giving it here. It feeds the mind and
fills the heart with life, faith, hope and love.
My brother, who was once the pupil of Tom F.
Mcßeath, says he is the very man to have written
the words, “This sweet life of ours,” for he is a
man of happy, radiant spirits, and to him life is
indeed sweet and inspiring. W. D. U.
BIOPSIS.
By,Tom F. Mcßeath.
It cannot be that this sweet life of ours,
So grand, so glorious and so beautiful,
So full of mighty promises, is but
The clash of blind and senseless atoms, and
At last dissolves in empty nothingness!
It cannot be that its bright, crystal stream
Runs darkling to the deeps of endless death,
When every wave that wooes the winding banks,
Sings of the summer skies from whence it came!
What is this in this tenement of clay
That like a caged wild bird beats its wings
Against its prison bars, unless it be
A captive spirit, fretting neath the chains
Os conscious slavery, struggling to be free?
This ceasless longing after better things
Than earth hath ever promised, or can give,
Whence comes it, if the yearning, homesick soul
One of the Piaster Poems
of the English Tongue
Hath not had visions of some happier sphere
To our dim eyes invisible, or else
There lingers still some half waking dream—
Sweet memories of a former glory lost?
0 grand, invisible and potent essence, Life!
In vain the student seeks with ehemic test
To fathom thy deep mystery. All in vain,
With fierce and fiery questions would he wring,
Poor tortured nature writhing on the rack —
Confession from her suffering, silent lips
Os that mysterious, subtle power that moves,
Controls and regulates her wondrous works.
He sees it laughing in the budding flower;
He hears it thrilling in the skylark’s song;
He feels it throbbing in the fiery flood
That leaps like liquid lightning through his veins,
And maddened at the mockery of his powers,
Calls bold, unblushing science to his aid,
Who armed with scalpel and retort, pursues
With patient search the protean phantom down
Through system, organ, member, molecule
And atom, but to find for all her pains,
There’s that within the lowliest thing that lives
That will not yield to his analysis.
In nature is no death, unless that death
Be called, which is but change to newer forms
Os ever-upward-reaching life. In al]
This ceaseless change, beginning finds she none,
Nor phophecy of end. No further seek.
Before us and behind the curtains fall,
Forever shutting from our vision out
The secrets of the silent land beyond.
Across these borders science cannot pass;
And proud Philosophy, with gathered skirts,
Stops at the threshold, and with hand to brow,
Peers with wide wondering eyes and silent lips
Into the darkness that she dares not trust.
But Faith, Love’s white-winged daughter, lifts the
veil
That shuts the future out, and whispers hope.
The soul, with an unerring instinct that
As far transcends the utmost reach and power
Os weak and faltering reason as the stars
Their pale reflection in the troubled poo],
Proclaims herself a thing of birth divine,
And crowns herself immortal!
* I
We do live!
And it concerns us most not what is life,
But how shall we best use it, that when called
To lay its glittering pageantry aside,
And clothed in death’s pale robe of night, lie down
To that long dreamless sleep that separates
Time’s evening from Eternity’s fair morn,
Our deeds of love, in hearts we leave behind,
May live forever; and across the gulf
That circles round the narrow shores of time,
(Concluded on Page 9.)
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