Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Monthly Bulletin Published monthly, except in August and September, by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Forbes Street and Bellefield Avenue, Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, Pa. President, S. H. Church, Carnegie Library, Forbes Street and Bellefield Avenue; Secretary, J. D. Hailman; Treasurer, James H. Reed, 1027 Carnegie Building; Director, John H. Leete, Carnegie Library, Forbes Street and Bellefield Avenue. Subscription 50 cents a year. Vol. 26 January 1921 No. I Pittsburgh or Pittsburg Whether to write Pittsburgh or Pittsburg is a question which recurs with what seems surprising frequency until one remembers that each year the industries and other interests of Pittsburgh bring to the city large numbers of people who are not acquainted with the history attached to the name, or with the official decisions which have been made concerning the way in which it should. be spelled. In 1908 the spelling with the final "h" was officially restored after a period during which the United States Post Office Department, following the United States Board of Geographic Names, had dropped the final "h." Through the efforts of interested citizens, there was started a movement which ended in official recognition of the spelling "Pittsburgh." The findings of the committee appointed at that time to investigate the historical aspects of the question are reprinted here. The only historically correct spelling of the word Pittsburgh, as designating the city located at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, is with the final "h." In 1768, the descendants of Wm. Penn, the original proprietary of the land known as Pennsylvania, purchased from the Indian tribes known as the Six Nations, lands situated in the Western part of this state, and including the land covered by the present City of Pittsburgh. In 1769, a survey was made of the land lying between the two rivers, which the Penns had reserved to the private enjoyment of the proprietaries, and which they called the "Manor of Pittsburgh." In 1784, the laying out of the "Town of Pittsburgh" was completed by Thos. Vicroy of Bedford County and approved by the attorney of the Penns in Philadelphia. The Act of March 5, 1804, which modified the provisions of the old charter of the Borough of Pittsburgh in 1794— the original of which is not in existence, so far as known-refers throughout to the "Borough of Pittsburgh." The Act of March 18, 1816, incorporated the City of Pittsburgh. The original charter was burned when the old Court House was destroyed by fire. In the Act incorporating the City of Pittsburgh, the "h" is used. In printing this Act in one of the law reports, the "h" was evidently dropped by the printer. The ordinance for the organization of the City of Pittsburgh after the passage of the Act of 1816, and recorded in ordinance book, Vol. 1, page 1, with the seal of the City of Pittsburgh attached, is uniform in the use of the "h." The present seal of the City of Pittsburgh, bears the words, "The Seal of the City of Pittsburgh," and is dated 1816. From a report submitted by the Committee on Education, of the Chamber of Commerce of Pittsburgh, May 7, 1908. "Let us read to weigh and to consider. In the times before us that promise or threaten deep political, economical, and social controversy, what we need to do is to induce our people to weigh and consider...The thing that matters most, both for happiness and for duty, is that we should strive habitually to live with wise thoughts and right feelings. Literature helps us more than other studies to this most blessed companionship of wise thoughts and right feelings." From John Morley's “On the Study of Literature." Shelley's "Adonais" One hundred years ago, in 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote and published his "Adonais." Its history as given by Edward Dowden in his "The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley" is quoted here. The death of Keats, which took place on the night of February 23, 1821, was announced in the Examiner of March 25, and it was probably from its pages or from a letter of Horace Smith, written a week later, that Shelley received the first tidings of the event. Deep personal affection for Keats he had never felt; but the untimely death of a young man of genius, the victim, as he believed, of unmerited literary persecution, moved him to sorrow and indignation. The "Adonais," which takes its place in literature beside the laments of Moschus for Bion, and of Milton for Lycidas, belongs to that class of elegiac poems which does not aim at perpetuating the memory of the dead by a monumental portrait (to this class belong such pieces as Daniel's memorial of the Earl of Devonshire, and Taylor's admirable lines in remembrance of Edward Villiers), but rather celebrates the dead through a celebration of grief and an impassioned meditation upon death. We do not know Keats more truly when we have read Shelley's poem, but our spirits are attuned to contemplate aright the untimely and sudden withdrawal, at whatever time or place, of bright things from earth-a withdrawal which we must lament, yet which is only apparent and not real. The chief portrait contained in the poem is that incidentally introduced of Shelley himself. "He, as I guess, Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, "A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift A Love in desolation masked-a Power Yet, though it contain no sculptured portrait of Keats, "Adonais" is the costliest monument in verse ever erected to the memory of an English singer. Before its close the poem rises into an impassioned hymn of immortality-the immortality of that spirit from which man arises, in which he lives and moves, and to the blessed life of which he returns at last. Those elevating and tranquilizing stanzas imaging the beauty of the Roman cemetery seem written with some prophetic sense against the day of Shelley's own burial. On June 5, Shelley informed Mr. Gisborne that the poem would shortly be finished, and three days later he wrote to Ollier, bidding him announce it for publication; but after that date some fifteen stanzas were added or inserted. On the 11th, he wrote again to Ollier. "'Adonais,'" he says, "is finished; and you will soon receive it. It is little adapted for popularity, but is perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions." The account of Keats's last hours, written by Colonel Finch and forwarded by Mr. Gisborne, reached Shelley after his poem had been written. "I do not think," he wrote, "that if I had seen it before, I could have composed my poem. The enthusiasm of the imagination would have overpowered the sentiment." Shelley esteemed his work from the imaginative craftsman's point of view as "a highly wrought piece of art," perhaps better, he says, in point of composition than anything he had yet written. In order to secure accuracy in printing, he entrusted his manuscript (June 16) to a Pisan press, where the types of the celebrated French printers Didot were used. On July 13, he received the first copy, which was immediately despatched to Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne at Leghorn. "My dearest friends," he wrote, in reply to their letter of thanks and approval, “I am fully repaid for the painful emotions from which some verses of my poem sprung, by your sympathy and approbation, which is all the reward I expect, and as much as I desire. It is not for me to judge whether, in the high praise your feelings assign me, you are right or wrong. The poet and the man are two different natures; though they exist together, they may be unconscious of each other, and incapable of deciding on each other's powers and efforts by any reflex act. The decision of the cause, whether or no I am a poet, is removed from the present time to the hour when our posterity shall assemble; but the court is a very severe one, and I fear that the verdict will be, 'Guilty-death!'" Shelley had no confidence that either his own writings or those of Keats would secure public attention for the present, and this it was, he informed Severn, which prevented him from making an attempt to collect the literary remains of Keats, and publish them with a life and criticism. Yet he could not doubt that the elegy, on which he had wrought with all his powers as an artist, would live for the delight of future generations. "I confess I should be surprised," he wrote to Ollier (November 11, 1821), “if that poem were born to an immortality of oblivion." Shelley hoped to subjoin to the London edition of "Adonais" a study of the genius of Keats, but no traces of such a study can be found among his papers. No London edition other than that transmitted from Pisa appeared. But seven years after Shelley's death the poem was reprinted at Cambridge, by a society of young and enthusiastic admirers of Keats and Shelley. Either Monckton Milnes or Arthur Hallam read and corrected the proofs. |