JOHN M. HARNEY.
John M. Harnet, the second son of Thomas Harney, an officer in the Amer- ican army during the war for independence, was born on the ninth of Marcli, 1789, in Sussex county, Delaware. In the year 1791, the family emigrated to Ten- nessee, and afterward removed to Louisiana. An older brother became a surgeon in the army, and a younger one was commissioned as a Lieutenant in 1818. In 1847 he was brevetted a Brigadier General for services at Cerro Gordo, and is now com- mander of the American forces on the Pacific frontier of Oregon. John M. studied medicine and settled at Bardstown, Kentucky. In 1814 he was married to a daughter of Judge John Rowan. The death of his wife, about four years after their wedding, weighed so seriously upon him that he abandoned his prac- tice at Bardstown, and, after a brief visit to Tennessee, went to Europe. He traveled in Great Britain, France and Spain. Then, receiving a naval appointment, spent several years at Buenos Ayres. On his return to the United States, he resided for a few months at Savannah, Georgia, where he conducted a political newspaper. Severe exertion at a disastrous fire, in that city, was the cause of a violent fever which under- mined his constitution. He returned to Bardstown with broken health, and died there on the fifteenth of January, 1825. Excepting "Crystalina, a Fairy Tale," in six cantos, which was published in 1816, Mr. Harney's poems were not given to the world till after his death. William D. Gallagher, who examined his manuscripts, found several poems he deemed superior to any by Mr. Harney that have been published, but we have not been able to obtain copies of any of them. The lines, " To a Valued Friend," " Echo and the Lover," and "The Whippowil," were first published in The Western Literary Journal, in 1837, edited by Mr. Gallagher. " The Echo " has had as wide a circulation as any poem ever written in the western country. It is the original of many verses on the same theme, since published both in England and America. Respecting "Crystalina," Rufus Wilmot Griswold, in his Poets and Poetry of America, said : '•Crystalina" was completed when Mr. Harney was about twenty-three years of age, but in con- sequence of " the proverbial indifference, and even contempt, with which Americans receive the works of their countrymen," he informs us, in a brief preface, was not published until 1816, when it appeared anonymously in New York. It received much attention in the leading literary journals of that day. Its obvious faults were freely censured, but upon the whole it was reviewed with unusual manifestations of kindly interest. The sensitive poet, however, was so deeply wounded by some unfavorable criticisms that he suppressed nearly all the copies he had caused to be printed, so that it has since been among our rarest books. (25)
