Sans un nuage au front, sans une peine à l'âme Des heures se traînant lentes, pleines d'ennuis, A M.. Pour celui qui n'a plus ici-bas une mère, Hélas! sans une mère, au sourire divin, Non, ne me parlez plus de lauriers et de gloire; La gloire n'est qu'un mot, et je n'y veux plus croire: Pour celui qui n'a plus ici-bas une mère, IRWIN RUSSELL [1853-1879] A. A. KERN Small was thy share in all this world's delight, HE broken arc of Irwin Russell's life extended over but twenty TH six pathetic years. His father, Dr. William McNab Russell, came of an Ohio family that had moved from Virginia, and his mother, née Elizabeth Allen, was a native of New York but of New England ancestry. She had taught in a girls' boarding-school at Bordentown, New Jersey, owned by the father of Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the present editor of The Century Magazine, and at the time of her marriage was teaching in the Port Gibson (Mississippi) Female College. Irwin Russell was born in Port Gibson, June 3, 1853. He inherited, together with his mother's brightness of intellect, something of her frail constitution; and an attack of yellow fever which he suffered when only three months old still further weakened his physical strength. Two years later he lost one of his eyes through an accident, and constant study afterward so impaired the remaining eye as to necessitate the use of spectacles. He was a funloving, adventurous boy, and withal unusually bright and fond of reading. This love of books, and the restraining control of a mother's love guiding and guarding him, seem to have been the two chief influences of his boyhood. His education, begun in St. Louis, where the family lived from 1853 to 1861, and continued in the Port Gibson schools, was completed with credit at the St. Louis University in 1869. The sixteen-year-old graduate returned to Port Gibson, and, after reading law for three years, was, though still a minor, admitted to the Bar by a special act of Legislature. It is said, however, that he forsook the law without ever having had a case in court. Traces of his legal training occur in such poems as "Wherefore He Prays That A Warrant May Issue," "The Mississippi Witness," and "The First Client." There is much in Russell's life that calls to mind Robert Louis Stevenson. His mode of life at this period was in accord with the theory that Stevenson upheld in his "Apology for Idlers" and exemplified in his own career. He wrote only when under the impulse to do so, and more for his own and his friends' pleasure than for any financial return-sometimes sending his poems to the local newspapers and sometimes to the national magazines. He was a contributor to Puck and to Appleton's Journal, but the majority of his poems appeared in Scribner's Monthly (now The Century Magazine). His first contribution to this periodical, "Uncle Cap Interviewed," appeared in January, 1876; and his masterpiece, "ChristmasNight in the Quarters," after being refused by the Port Gibson Réveille on account of its length, was published in Scribner's two years later. Like Stevenson, also, he possessed a restless, roving disposition that often caused him to be dissatisfied with present surroundings and sent him in search of change. Thus he is known to have set out for California, to have lived a short time on the plains of Texas, and then to have attempted to run off to sea. But in each case the journeys, from one cause or another, usually sickness, ended where they began. Perhaps he hints at one of the reasons for his invariable return to Port Gibson when he makes one of his characters in "Norvern People" declare: Dat ol' Marsissippi's jes ober de fence Dat runs aroun' hebben's sarcumferymence. Apart from his poetic genius, Russell's life might be comprised within three words: literature, roving, and drink. It seems probable that he began to drink rather early in life and mainly from a love of mental excitement; it is certain that the habit increased its hold upon him until his death, and was the chief deterrent factor in his career. In 1878 Port Gibson was again visited by yellow fever. With heroic self-sacrifice the poet and his father remained in the town nursing the fever-stricken victims and burying the dead. Some idea of the hardships they endured can be gained from Russell's letters of this period. In one of them he writes: "Four days ago I, for the first time in a month, sat down to a regularly cooked and served meal. . . . Between six hundred and seven hundred people remained in the town to face the fever. Out of these there have been about five hundred and seventy cases." For the father the strain proved too great, and at the close of the epidemic Dr. Russell suddenly died. Cast thus upon his own resources, Russell determined to go to New York and make a living with his pen. Arriving there in December, 1878, he met with a cordial welcome from such men as Henry C. Bunner, Richard Watson Gilder, and Robert Underwood Johnson, who had known him through his verse and were personally interested in him. But not even their care could guard him from himself, and his irregular habits soon brought him to poverty and then to illness. Rising from a bed of fever, weak and dazed, he wandered down to the docks and offered to work his way to New Orleans as a coal-heaver. Here he pieced out his existence by dint of literary hack-work of various sorts, most of it done for the New Orleans Times. Even before he left Port Gibson, his frail body had become aweary of the buffetings of this hard world. In the "Studies in Style," after the manner of his master, Burns, he expresses his own worldweariness and his devotion to poetry. The warld, they say, is gettin' auld; But sure her face seems freezin' cauld In summer, though the sun may shine, Ae spark of poesy divine Will keep me warm. His repeated attempts to start anew had made him lose faith in himself, and from this time he tended more and more to sink into a mood of helpless despair, tinged with regret. Speaking to Catherine Cole, of the Times staff, into whose office he often dropped to chat or jest, he said: "It has been the romance of a weak young man threaded in with the pure love of a mother, a beautiful girl who hoped to be my wife, and friends who believed in my future. I have watched them lose heart, lose faith, and again and again I have been so stung and startled that I have resolved to save myself in spite of myself. . . . I never shall." On December 23, 1879, in an humble dwelling on a side street, attended only by his poor Irish landlady, he gave up the struggle of life, and the land he loved was poorer in the loss of one of its most rarely gifted sons. His body was buried first in New Orleans, but later removed to Belle |