blacksmithing, herding cattle and sheep, and earned his way through the public schools at Suisun, California, San Jose normal school and Santa Rosa college. His boyhood poems were published in California papers.
We claim him for Oregon City and Oregon. His best known poem is "The Man with the Hoe." The following lines, entitled "The Menace of the Tower," is appropriate to the times:
In storied Venice, down whose rippling streets
The stars go hurrying, and the white moon beats.
Stood the great Bell Tower, fronting seas and skies,
Fronting the ages, drawing all men's eyes;
Rooted like Teneriffe, aloft and proud,
Taunting the lightning, tearing the flying cloud.
It marked the hours of Venice; all men said,
Time cannot reach to bow that lofty head;
Time, that shall touch all else with ruin, must
Forbear to make this shaft confess its dust;
Yet all the while, in secret, without sound,
The fat worms gnawed the timbers underground.
The twisting worm, whose epoch is an hour,
Caverned its way into the mighty tower;
And suddenly it shook, it swayed, it broke,
And fell in darkening thunder at one strogke.
The strong shaft, with an angel on the crown.
Fell ruining; a thousand years went down!
And so I fear, my country, not the hand
That shall hurl night and whirlwind on the land;
I fear not Titan traitors who shall rise
To stride like Brocken shadows on our skies—
Not giants who shall come to overthrow
And send on Earth an Illiad of woe.
I fear the vermin that shall undermine
Senate and citadel and school and shrine—
The Worm of Greed, the fated Worm of Ease,
And all the crawling progeny of these—
The vermin that shall honeycomb the towers
And walls of state in unsuspecting hours.
Samuel L. Simpson is the Poet Laureate of Oregon. He is emphatically an Oregon production. He was born in Missouri and came to Oregon with his parents in 1846, and was educated at the Willamette university. Studied law but took to literature and newspaper work in preference. His poems are fugitive pieces rather than serious study. And the force and beauty of them establish a claim to great talent as a poet. His works have recently, fifteen or more years after his death, been gathered up by a sister and published in an elegant volume. His best known poem is entitled "Ad Willametam," an apostrophe to the river he loved so well. We print the whole poem.
From the Cascade's frozen gorges.
Leaping like a child at play.
Winding, widening through the Valley,
