FullReads

Of this class of our generals was Ormsby M. Mitchell, the eminent astronomer in charge of the observatory at Cincinnati, who was among the first to go from that city to the war. He won rank and honor without fighting a battle, by virtue of the same qualities which enabled him to do more than any one else towards founding a public observatory at Cincinnati before any city in the East had one.

He was of Kentucky birth, and came a child to Ohio; but William H. Lytle, dear to lovers of poetry as the author of the fine lyric, “Antony and Cleopatra,” was born in Cincinnati, of the old Scotch-Irish stock, in 1826. He had everything pleasant in life and he enjoyed his prosperity, but when the war came he met its call halfway. At Chickamauga he fell, pierced by three bullets, in the thick of the fight. As he dropped from his horse into the arms of friends, he smiled his gratitude, and spent his last breath in urging them to save themselves, and leave him to his fate. The poem which begins with the well-known words,

“I am dying, Egypt, dying,”

will keep the name of Lytle in remembrance perhaps longer than all the poems of Phoebe and Alice Cary shall live, such are the caprices of fame; but the verse of these sisters is a part of American literature, as they themselves are a part of its history. They were true poets, and in their work a sense of

“The broad horizons of the West”

first made itself felt. They left the farm where they were born near College Hill and came to live in Cincinnati after they began to be known in literature, and later they went to dwell among the noises of New York, where they died; but the country, the sweet Miami country, remained a source of their inspiration, and now and again the reader tastes its charm in their verse.

They were undeniably Ohioan, while Pennsylvania may dispute our right to the fame of Thomas Buchanan Read, though his most famous poem, “Sheridan’s Ride,” was written and first recited in Cincinnati. We must not more than remind ourselves that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe passed part of her early life in that city, and is known to have gathered much of the suggestion for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” among the Ohio scenes where some of its most vivid events occur.

In the county of Huron a man of unquestionable claim to remembrance was born. George Kennan, whose enviable privilege it was to let the light in upon the misery of Siberian exile and to awaken the abhorrence of the world for Russian tyranny, was a native of Norwalk, where he grew up a telegraph operator. He worked at night and went to school by day, and when only nineteen, while one of the chief operators in Cincinnati, he applied for leave to join an expedition for laying a cable from Alaska to Siberia by way of Bering Strait. He was asked if he could get ready to start in two weeks, and he answered that he could get ready to start in two hours. He was appointed, and in this way he came to know the horrors which he afterwards studied more fully in a second visit to Siberia. He traveled fifteen hundred miles through that wintry prison of Russia, and saw and heard the sorrowful things which the despotism of the Czar has done to men who dare to love freedom.

His report of these cruelties has at least put their authors to shame before the civilized world, if it has not wrought so great an open change as the work of another Ohio man in dealing with even greater atrocities. It is interesting to note that Januarius A. Mac-Gahan was born in the same county as Philip H. Sheridan, of the same Irish parentage, to the same Catholic religion, and the same early poverty. He saw the light in July, 1844, in a log cabin on his father’s little farm among the woods near New Lexington in Perry County. He studied hard at school, and read constantly out of school, when a boy. When a little older, he worked for the neighboring farmers; he hoped to get a school to teach; but he could not get it in his own home, where he was thought too young, and he had to go to Indiana for it. From there he went to St Louis, where he became a newspaper reporter. In 1868 he sailed for Europe to study French and German, hoping to come home and practice law in that city. But his duty as correspondent took him to the scenes of various European wars, and launched him at last amidst the barbaric outrages of the Turks in Bulgaria. His exposure of their abominable misdeeds in 1876 roused the whole world; the English government officially examined his facts and found them indisputable. The war began between Russia and Turkey, and MacGahan returned to Bulgaria with the victorious Russian troops. There, wherever the people knew him, they hailed him as their savior. He had made their miseries so widely known to mankind as to render it impossible that they should continue. It is not strange that they thronged upon him, and kissed his hands, his boots, his saddle, his horse. In the peace that followed, a whole empire was torn from the bloody hands of the Turks, and four Christian peoples were saved from their savage rule. Bulgaria, Roumania, Roumelia, and Servia now belong to themselves, and all this has come about from the efforts of an unknown young Ohio man, who went abroad to study the languages, and changed the map of Europe. It reads like wild romance, but it is sober history.