SOLITUDE

SOLITUDE

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone,

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;

Sigh, it is lost on the air,

The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.

Be glad, and your friends are many;

Be sad, and you lose them all,

There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a large and lordly train,

But one by one we must all file on

Through the narrow aisles of pain.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

SOLITUDE

IN May, 1883, there was published at Chicago a thin little volume containing about fifty poems of very second-rate quality which, in the ordinary course of events, would have quickly dropped from sight and been forgotten. But some adroit advertising, combined with an astounding absence of humor on the part of certain editors and reviewers, changed all that, and this little book not only made a great splash in the literary mill-pond, but convinced many Americans for all time that its author was an abandoned creature, a slave to passions quite oriental in their character, and the heroine of various torrid love adventures.

The book bore the daring title Poems of Passion, but its author, far from being an adventuress, was a little Wisconsin girl named Ella Wheeler, the daughter of a poor farmer, who had lived all her life in the cramped environment of a tiny hamlet called Johnson Centre, whose knowledge of the world was bounded by a few short visits to Madison and Milwaukee, and whose acquaintance with literature was confined to the menus furnished by the New York Mercury and the New York

Ledger, and to the novels of Ouida, Mary J. Holmes and Mrs. Southworth-with a later smattering of Gautier, Shakespeare, Swinburne and Byron.

All this is evident enough in the book itself, for the verses it contained were exactly the sort of sentimental rot that a Mary J. Holmes heroine would write; but most readers jumped to the conclusion that Miss Wheeler must herself have undergone the emotional experiences which she described, and her image as a Woman with a Past was then and there fixed permanently in the public mind.

The volume had started off with the immense advantage of a lot of advertising such as is now supplied by the Vice Society to certain fortunate books. McClurg, of Chicago, had declined to publish it on the ground that it was immoral; Miss Wheeler, quite outraged, told a friend in Milwaukee about it, and this friend in turn told one of the Milwaukee papers, which thereupon published a column article headed,

TOO LOUD FOR CHICAGO

The Scarlet City by the Lake Shocked by a Badger Girl, whose Verses out-Swinburne Swin

burne and out-Whitman Whitman.

Another Chicago publisher, less fastidious than McClurg, at once saw the opportunity to