Under a toadstool crept a wee Elf,
Out of the rain to shelter himself.
Under the toadstool, sound asleep,
Sat a big Dormouse all in a heap.
Trembled the wee Elf, frightened and yet
Fearing to fly away lest he get wet.
To the next shelter—maybe a mile!
Sudden the wee Elf smiled a wee smile.
Tugged till the toadstool toppled in two.
Holding it over him, gaily he flew.
Soon he was safe home, dry as could be.
Soon woke the Dormouse—“Good gracious me!
“Where is my toadstool?” loud he lamented.
—And that’s how umbrellas first were invented.
_Richard Hovey_
Richard Hovey was born in 1864 at Normal, Illinois, and graduated
from Dartmouth in 1885. After leaving college, he became, in rapid
succession, a theologian, an actor, a journalist, a lecturer, a
professor of English literature at Barnard, a poet and a dramatist.
His first volume, _The Laurel: An Ode_ (1889), betrayed the
overmusical influence of Lanier and gave promise of that
extraordinary facility which often brought Hovey perilously close to
the pit of mere technique. His exuberant virility found its outlet
in the series of poems published in collaboration with Bliss
Carman—the three volumes of _Songs from Vagabondia_ (1894, 1896,
1900). Here he let himself go completely; nothing remained sober or
static. His lines fling themselves across the page; dance with
intoxicating abandon; shout with a wild irresponsibility; leap,
laugh, carouse and carry off the reader in a gale of high spirits.
The famous _Stein Song_ is but an interlude in the midst of a far
finer and even more rousing poem that, with its flavor of Whitman,
begins:
I said in my heart, “I am sick of four walls and a ceiling.
I have need of the sky.
I have business with the grass.
I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling,
Lone and high,
And the slow clouds go by.
I will get me away to the waters that glass
The clouds as they pass....”
Hovey’s attitude to his art may be expressed in no better way than
his own words concerning the poet: “It is not his mission,” wrote
Hovey in the _Dartmouth Magazine_, “to write elegant canzonettas for
the delectation of the _dilettanti_, but to comfort the sorrowful
and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to
humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart
of man—all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to
reveal the beauty in things and breathe into his fellows a love of
it.” This almost too conscious awareness of the poet’s “mission”
often marred Hovey’s work; in responding to his program, he
frequently overstressed his ringing enthusiasm, strained his own
muscularity. But his power was as unflagging as his fraternal energy
was persuasive. And in certain quieter moods the poet rose to new
heights. The work on which he was engaged at the time of his death
is significant; _Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Five Dramas_ is
magnificent in its restrained vitality.
Although the varied lyrics in _Songs from Vagabondia_ are the best
known examples of Hovey, a more representative collection of his
riper work may be found in _Along the Trail_ (1898). This volume
contains “Spring” and the stirring “Comrades” in full as well as the
best of his vivid fragments.
Hovey died, during his thirty-sixth year, in 1900.