Professors Henry C. Adams, George H. Darwin, and Mark H. Liddell are among the contributors to the Atlantic Monthly for April. One of the most valuable articles for teachers is the one "On the teaching of English," by Prof. Liddell. It sets forth with convincing argument the necessity of a thorough study and teaching of our mother tongue.

The April Century contains a number of articles on Pennsylvania coal mining, one of them by Jay

Hambidge the artist, who contributes "An Artist's Impressions of the Colliery Region." The illustrations include views in Lattimer, where the recent strikes oc

curred, and Mr. Hambidge has made a great number of interesting sketches of the many types of people that he found in the collieries.

Among the special features contained in Harper's Magazine for April, the following are worthy of special mention: "How to Cycle in Europe," by Joseph Pennell; "The Closing Scene at Appomattox Court House," by Gen. George A. Forsyth, U. S. A.; "The Essentials at Fort Adobe: Cavalry Tactics on the Plains," by Frederic Remington; "Commercial Aspects of the Panama Canal," by Worth

ington C. Ford; "England and Germany," by Sidney Whitman, F. R. G. S.; "Some Byways of the Brain," first paper, by Andrew Wilson, M. D.

The Ladies' Home Journal for April contains, among its many interesting articles, one on

"The Anecdotal Side of Edison," which will prove helpful to teachers in presenting to their pupils the life of this great genius.

Prominent among the articles in the April Arena is one by Henry C. Whitney on "Abraham Lincoln: A Study from Life."

VOL. XLVII.

No. 5.

The proposal by friends and admirers of the poet-painter, T. B. Read, to dedicate to his memory a tablet to be placed in the wall of the house in which the poem "Sheridan's Ride," was written. revives public interest in a man who, though not Ohio born, loved the Buckeye State and did some of his best work within its borders. Sociable by nature and familiar with society, Thomas Buchanan Read intensely enjoyed life in cities. Boon companions greeted him in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, in London and Paris, in Florence and Rome; but his favorite social harbor and resort was Cincinnati. The Queen City was his true, cherishing mother, the nurse of his best ambitions, the promptress of his noblest resolves. A lad not yet eighteen years old, he first came to the metropolis of the Ohio valley in 1839. From that time to the period of his last

visit to Rome, in 1867, he made occasional pilgrimages to Cincinnati, where he sojourned, a welcome and happy guest. His art career was there begun, and some of the latest and best products of his pen and of his brush were completed in that city. Not a few of his paintings are carefully preserved in private or public collections in Cincinnati. Among these may be mentioned characteristic canvases representing "The Harp of Erin," "The Triumph of Freedom," "Hero and Leander," and portraits of Nicholas Longworth, Gen. W. H. Harrison, Maj. Robert Anderson, Col. C. W. Woolley and others.

The records of the "Literary Club," of Cincinnati, show that Read became a member of that discriminating body as long ago as 1852, three years after the club was formed, and ten years before the Burnet Rifles, mostly made up

of members of the club, was organized. In the years 1861-67, Mr. Read was a resident of Cincinnati, engaged not only in the pursuits of art and literature, but active also in every patriotic duty. He was on the staff of Gen. Lew Wallace when the city was menaced by Kirby Smith, and he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly a history of the "Siege" of our beloved metropolis. In that terrific struggle it was the fortune of the writer of this sketch to share as a heroic private in the Teachers' Rifles, Captain Flint commander, in the regiment of Colonel Fisher. Among the topics of humorous comment in those days that tried men's shoe soles, was the peril of guarding the Fifth Street Market House, while the "squirrel hunters" attacked their lunch within its shelter. Mr. Read's sense of the ludicrous was very keen, and no one relished more than he the current jests and anecdotes concerning the serio-comic exploits of the citizen soldiery. It was during the period of the poet's residence in the city while the Civil War was going on, that I frequently had the pleasure of meeting him, either at his studio on the north side of Fourth street, just east of Elm, or at the residence of his brother-in-law, Mr. Cyrus Garrett, No. 49 West Eighth street, where he made his home.

Voluble and vivacious in conversation, Read delighted in personal narrative, repartee and pun. It

was a pleasant pastime with him to tell the romantic story of his boyhood and youth, of his running away from Downington, Pa., where he was a tailor's apprentice, to seek his fortune in the West. Not charmed with his sartorial prospects, he scrawled his name in charcoal on the wall of the attic in which he slept and, bundle in hand, made a pilgrimage across the Alleghanies and down the Ohio river on a flat-boat. One of the first employments he undertook in the Miami country was that of a decorative painter of canal boats on the Miami canal. His first art work in Cincinnati was humble enough; he was somehow discovered by Clevinger, the sculptor, in whose studio located on the southwest corner of Race and Seventh streets, he wrought letters, emblems and faces on monuments of freestone. Showing talent in the use of chisel and pencil, he attracted the favorable attention of Ohio's then sole millionaire, Nicholas Longworth, who encouraged his tastes, artistic and literary, and gave him pecuniary aid to follow the bent of his genius. In 1841 he went to Boston and opened a studio. The poet-artist Washington Allston gave him countenance and instruction; and Mr. Longfellow, with characteristic kindness, fostered his aspirations and opened to him all Cambridge doors.

It was in Boston that, exposed to the pervasive literary contagion,

Read caught the poetic fever, and began to write verses for the Courier. Longfellow took a lasting interest in the promising young Apollo. It was the privilege of your contributor to hear the elder poet at his own table in Nahant describe Read as he appeared in 1841. He said that the man at that time looked the ideal artist, young, handsome, enthusiastic and modest. Visitors to Cambridge were shown the portraits that Read painted of Longfellow and his three girl children. The artist also painted a picture of a boy climbing the Alps, with the American flag in his grasp -a design suggested by the poem "Excelsior". I had from Mr. Read's lips a version of the story of the well-known lyric-a story differing from the one generally accepted as true. The poem "Excelsior" was written while Read was a guest of Longfellow, engaged in painting the celebrated picture of the "Three Children." According to Read the last stanza, beginning "At break of day as heavenward", was first in the order of composition, and that the author wrought out the verses after going to bed, and fearing that he might forget the lines before morning, he got up and committed them to paper, sitting in his night-gown, or, as Read put it, "in his shirt tail." When the lyric was finished, the poet read it out to the artist and asked an opinion on its merits. "I told him," said Read, "that it was good

enough, but that I could write a better with my left hand, to which he said he had no doubt of it."

From Boston Read removed, in 1846, to Philadelphia, where he devoted himself, with the energy of youth and ambition, to his chosen muses of painting and poetry. His first book of verses came out in 1847. In 1851 he made his first visit to Europe. He was twice. married. He lost his first wife and a daughter named Lily, in Florence, by cholera, in 1854. In 1856 he took to wife Harriett Dennison Butler, who is yet living in Germantown, Pa.

At the time of Mr. Read's last return to Cincinnati he was about forty years old. He had lived intensely in his sensations, his passions, his thoughts and his dreams of fame, and was older than his years. Already he began to speak of himself as superannuated, and to take solace in the past. His mind was filled with thronging regrets, and in his melancholy moods he disparaged himself and his work. A difficulty with his Boston publishers, Ticknor & Fields, led him to break with them and seek another imprint for his books, a rash mistake which he never ceased to regret. No one appreciated more than he did the truth of his criticism that his pen was too prolific. More than once his intimate friends heard him say, speaking of his collected works,-"These three vol