(In giving this sketch of the life of Gustavus Adolphus, n...)
In giving this sketch of the life of Gustavus Adolphus, no attempt has been made to present a complete life of the great king.
It is a history difficult for young people to understand, and for that reason only the leading events of a most eventful life have been presented.
It was first written for a lecture and entertainment, after the manner of my other entertainments on Church epochs, to be illustrated by stereopticon views, with three dramatic interludes—the first representing the joy of the Swedish people on Gustavus coming to the throne; the second showing Gustavus taking leave of his Parliament and friends as he is about to embark on the Thirty Years' War; the third, an act called "The Women who Loved Him." The evening was to open and close with church processionals in the native peasant costumes of Sweden and other Protestant countries of Europe.
It has been deemed best to present the story in book form, which will differ somewhat from the original lecture and dramatic representations, for the reason that pictures do away with the necessity for many words.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
Harriet Monroe was born on December 23, 1860, in Chicago. He was the fourth of seven children of Henry Stanton and Martha (Mitchell) Monroe. Three of her brothers died in infancy, but Dora Louise, Harriet (christened "Hattie"), Lucy, and William Stanton grew to maturity. Her father's family, of Highland Scots Jacobite descent (the name had originally been spelled Munro), had emigrated to America in the eighteenth century. Later, they moved from Connecticut to western New York, whence Harriet's father, a young attorney looking for a promising city in which to locate his practice, moved on in 1852 to Chicago. Harriet's childhood was one of moderate prosperity and indulgence in which her father's warm and commanding personality played an important part. Following the great fire of 1871, however, his career met with a series of reverses which by the last decade of the century reduced the family circumstances sharply.
Education
Though neither Harriet nor her parents possessed any definable religious convictions or allegiances, she was in 1877 placed as a student in Visitation Convent at Georgetown, D. C. , because of its educational and social advantages and its relatively low cost, and because it was thought a milder climate might help her recover from a recent illness. Here she graduated in 1879, after receiving from Sister Jane Frances Ripley, of the Concord, Massachusetts, family, and Sister Paulina, her instructor in literature, a strong reinforcement of her intellectual and literary tastes.
Career
During the winter of 1888-89, Monroe and her sister were frequent guests at the Sunday evenings of Edmund Clarence Stedman. Here she came to know Richard Watson Gilder, William Dean Howells, and Elizabeth and Richard Henry Stoddard and to form a close friendship with Henry Harland, subsequently founder and editor of the Yellow Book. The next two decades, centered in Chicago, were filled with family affairs, composition of "The Columbian Ode, " the official poem of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, active participation in the Chicago literary life of the 1890's, the writing of verse and prose for magazine publication, more or less steady employment as a writer on art and other cultural subjects for Chicago newspapers, the publication of five volumes of poetry and drama, a biography of her brother-in-law, John Wellborn Root, and extensive travel, the whole accomplished on a severely limited and uncertain income. In these, as in all her activities, the brisk and sympathetic spirit suggested by Miss Monroe's erect carriage, warm eyes, and determined set of mouth and chin carried her through a variety of trials to a variety of achievements. Always adventurous, her mind and imagination during these decades advanced, within the limits of her taste, to a balanced and alert maturity.
In the early months of 1911, she conceived the idea of a periodical to be devoted exclusively to poetry and cognate matters. The need, she felt, was apparent. There was no regular place in America where a poet could hope for publication in other than an ancillary and rigidly conventional capacity. After considerable pains, she completed a list of financial guarantors, chiefly from Chicago's wealthy art patrons, circularized as nearly as she could the whole world of living British and American poets for contributions, and on September 23, 1912, brought out the first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. This at once became a chief vehicle of twentieth-century movements in poetry and the most consistently reliable center of verse publication in the English-speaking world. With her roots deep in the idealistic literary culture of the turn-of-century, but possessed of growing independence of judgment, Harriet Monroe marshaled her contributors, her assistant editors, the insistent and instructive clamor of Ezra Pound, Poetry's foreign correspondent for its first six years, and the diverse enthusiasms of a rebellious literary generation in Chicago and the Middle West to provide for twentieth-century American poetry its most representative showplace.
She had nearly completed her autobiography, A Poet's Life, when, in Arequipa, Peru, following her attendance at a conference of the P. E. N. in Buenos Aires, she was stricken by a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. She was buried among the peaks of the Andes.
Quotations:
"Our little solos are a note in an immense chorus vibrating grandly through the universe, a chorus which accepts and harmonizes the whir of the cricket and the long drum-roll of the stars. "
""Look into thy heart and write!" is good advice, but not if interpreted to mean, "Look nowhere else!" The poet should know his world and, so far as his art is concerned, any kind of battering from his world is better than his own self-indulgent brooding. "
"Great ages of art come only when a widespread creative impulse meets an equally widespread impulse of sympathy. "
"The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have else they will never have better. "
"Surely the vogue of those twisted and contorted human figures must be as short as it is artificial. "
Membership
a member of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony
Connections
There is no information about her marriage and personal life.