# Famous Single Poems/Beautiful Snow

BEAUTIFUL SNOW
Oh! the snow, the beautiful snow, Filling the sky and the earth below; Over the house-tops, over the street, Over the heads of the people you meet; Dancing, Flirting, Skimming along, Beautiful snow! it can do nothing wrong. Flying to kiss a fair lady’s cheek; Clinging to lips in a frolicsome freak. Beautiful snow, from the heavens above, Pure as an angel and fickle as love!
Oh! the snow, the beautiful snow! How the flakes gather and laugh as they go! Whirling about in its maddening fun, It plays in its glee with every one. Chasing, Laughing, Hurrying by, It lights up the face and it sparkles the eye; And even the dogs, with a bark and a bound, Snap at the crystals that eddy around. The town is alive, and its heart in a glow To welcome the coming of beautiful snow.
How the wild crowd goes swaying along, Hailing each other with humor and song! How the gay sledges like meteors flash by— Bright for a moment, then lost to the eye. Ringing, Swinging, Dashing they go Over the crest of the beautiful snow: Snow so pure when it falls from the sky, To be trampled in mud by the crowd rushing by; To be trampled and tracked by the thousands of feet Till it blends with the horrible filth in the street.
Once I was pure as the snow—but I fell: Fell, like the snow-flakes, from heaven—to hell: Fell, to be tramped as the filth of the street: Fell, to be scoffed, to be spit on and beat. Pleading, Cursing, Dreading to die, Selling my soul to whoever would buy, Dealing in shame for a morsel of bread, Hating the living and fearing the dead. Merciful God! have I fallen so low? And yet I was once like this beautiful snow!
Once I was fair as the beautiful snow, With an eye like its crystals, a heart like its glow; Once I was loved for my innocent grace— Flattered and sought for the charm of my face. Father, Mother, Sisters all, God, and myself I have lost by my fall. The veriest wretch that goes shivering by Will take a wide sweep, lest I wander too nigh, For of all that is on or about me, I know There is nothing that’s pure but the beautiful snow.
How strange it should be that this beautiful snow Should fall on a sinner with nowhere to go! How strange it would be, when the night comes again, If the snow and the ice struck my desperate brain! Fainting, Freezing, Dying alone, Too wicked for prayer, too weak for my moan To be heard in the crash of the crazy town, Gone mad in its joy at the snow’s coming down; To lie and to die in my terrible woe, With a bed and a shroud of the beautiful snow!
John Whitaker Watson.
BEAUTIFUL SNOW
The human race is incurably romantic. It longs to believe that, however drab life may be in the immediate vicinity, somewhere else, in some happier clime, hearts are always light, virtue always rewarded, and high and passionate love the rule instead of the rare exception. Romance, romance—it is what every one sighs for and endeavors to experience—if not in person, at least by proxy; if not in one’s own life, then in a novel or a play or a movie.
Sometimes even in a poem!
Thousands and thousands of simple hearts have been wrung by Whittier’s pastoral of Maud Muller and the sentimental Judge, who used to sit and dream of her
In his marble hearth’s bright glow
after he had ridden away and
wedded a wife of richest dower, Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
Alas for maiden, alas for Judge, For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all, Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
Yet every sane person who stops to think of it knows that the Judge was wise to ride away back to his own circle and manner of life, and that if he had not done so, if he had tarried and married, instead of a little tender melancholy, he would have had a lifelong tragedy on his hands. Bret Harte perceived this, and had the courage, in a poem called “Mrs. Judge Jenkins,” to describe clearly and accurately what would undoubtedly have happened had the Judge led Maud back to his “garnished rooms”—the twins who looked too much like the men who raked the hay on old Muller’s farm, Maud growing broad and red and stout—
And looking down that dreary track, He half regretted that he came back;
For, had he waited, he might have wed Some maiden fair and thoroughbred;
For there be women as fair as she, Whose verbs and nouns do more agree.
Alas for maiden! alas for Judge! And the sentimental,—that’s one-half “fudge;”
For Maud soon thought the Judge a bore, With all his learning and all his lore;
And the Judge would have bartered Maud’s fair face For more refinement and social grace.
If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, “It might have been,”
More sad are these we daily see: “It is, but hadn’t ought to be.”
But this is not the stuff of which romance is made, the public will have none of it; and Maud Muller and the Beggar Maid and others of that ilk will always be popular heroines.
The task of the patient historian whose duty it too often is to puncture these pleasant fictions is a thankless one. To tear the halo of wifely devotion from the head of the Empress Josephine, to show that Queen Victoria was at bottom only an obstinate and narrow-minded woman—these are acts which to the multitude savor of sacrilege. Purveyors of mental food for popular consumption have long since discovered that a picturesque lie is far more convincing than a drab fact, and that it is a great mistake to permit a slavish regard for the truth ​to spoil a good story. The only sensible rule is to emulate Barney McGee!
American literature is overlaid with romantic fictions which, originating in the brain of some lecturer desperately endeavoring to keep his auditors awake, or of some newspaperman hard up for a story, accumulate detail after detail as they roll along until the minute grain of fact upon which they were sometimes founded becomes hopelessly lost amid imaginative accretions. It is with such a story that the present article is concerned.
The two decades from 1870 to 1890 were chiefly remarkable for sentimental balderdash. It was the taste of the time; it is, of course, the half-baked taste of all times, but the songs that were sung in “genteel” drawing-rooms and the verse which was read and recited and widely-acclaimed amid the same surroundings touched depths of imbecility which have never since been equaled. One of the most popular of such recitations was entitled “Beautiful Snow,” and purported to be the tragic revery of an outcast as she makes her way along the wintry streets of a great city in the midst of a driving snow-storm. It was “sure-fire stuff,” especially when recited by one of the gentler sex, because to the hopeless melancholy which was once so popular in pieces of this sort it added discussion, or at least mention, of a subject strictly taboo.
​The Scarlet Woman was a phenomenon to which polite society at that time not only shut its eyes, but of which it pretended to be unaware. If she was pictured at all, it was as despairing and hopeless, ceaselessly bemoaning her fall from virtue, drinking the dregs of misery and want, with remorse ever gnawing at her heart, and finally dying of starvation amid wretched surroundings.
The idea that a woman who had taken the wrong turning could ever come back was anathema. In fact, society was banded together to prevent her coming back. To contend that such a woman had any claim to consideration, that she might be a good sort at bottom, and that she might eventually make a success of her life and be happy and contented in her last days was to incur grave suspicion. French fiction was held to be vicious and degraded because it occasionally developed such a theme. The fact that she died of consumption was the one thing that palliated the sins of Camille. Nobody knew exactly what to make of Trilby, though her death, too, was to her credit; but everybody agreed that for Little Billee to have married her would have been a crime against good morals. For sin must be punished.
“Beautiful Snow” laid the colors on exactly as society liked to imagine them. It was real movie stuff—the only wonder is that it has never ​been made into a picture! The attention of the producers is called to it without charge.
Every once in a while a pathetic story connected with this poem starts anew on a round of the press. This tale as dressed-up by some resourceful sob-master so far surpasses the abilities of the present scribe that the only thing for him to do is to quote:
Highly educated and of accomplished manners, she might have shone in the best society. But the evil hour that proved her ruin was the door from childhood, and having spent a young life in disgrace and shame, the poor friendless one died the melancholy death of a broken-hearted outcast.
Among her personal effects was found in manuscript a poem entitled “The Beautiful Snow,” which was immediately carried to Enos B. Reed, at that time editor of the National Union. In the columns of that paper, on the morning of the day following the girl’s death, the poem appeared in print for the first time. When the paper containing the poem ​came out on Sunday morning, the body of the victim had not yet received burial. The attention of Thomas Buchanan Read, one of the first American poets, was so taken with its stirring pathos that he immediately followed the corpse to its final resting place, and reverently placed upon the grave a wreath of laurel.
No doubt that sentimental journey gave Mr. Read a good feeling at the heart, which amply repaid him for the cost of the laurel-wreath, but the unfortunate girl whom he thus honored was not the author of “Beautiful Snow.” It is strange how many people consider the possession of a manuscript poem to be prima facie evidence that the possessor is its author. If it shows one or two corrections, the case is popularly regarded as absolutely settled! It is sometimes very difficult to untangle such a controversy and to get at the truth, but in this case it is easy, for “Beautiful Snow” was published by Harper’s Weekly in its issue for November 27, 1858, some years before the death of the beautiful unknown.
Anonymity was the rule and the curse of the early American magazine. Just what useful end was supposed to be served by suppressing an author’s name is difficult to guess, but very few names were ever published. “Beautiful Snow” ​was unsigned, and no indication of the author was given either in the table of contents or in the index to the volume. It was not until 1869, when John Whitaker Watson published at Philadelphia a volume of verse called “Beautiful Snow and Other Poems,” that any authoritative indication was given as to who had written it.
Not that the publication of Mr. Watson’s book settled the matter. By no means! Probably no other poem in American literature has been so fought over. No less than seven people are said at one time or another to have claimed the high honor of being its author—Richard H. Chandler, William A. Silloway, William H. Sigourney, John McMasters, Dora Shaw, Dora Thorne and Henry W. Faxon—and some of them, at least, described in detail the circumstances under which it was composed.
A diverting anthology could be made of these narratives, but two of them will suffice here. Richard H. Chandler alleged that Mr. Watson had stolen the poem from him in revenge for a practical joke—and had even carried this revenge to the point of having the poem published in Harper’s Weekly. Mr. Chandler had not hitherto been known as a poet, but he disclosed the fact that he had written much, and added that the only reason no other poem of his had ever been published was because “the publishers sent them all back.” This he seemed ​to consider an ample and satisfying explanation—as, indeed, it was!
William Allen Silloway insisted that he had published the poem in a New England paper (name not given) four years prior to its appearance in Harper’s Weekly, but the files had unfortunately been destroyed. He had been inspired to its composition through the degradation of his wife, “a niece of Millard Fillmore,” who had fallen a victim to the Demon Rum, and who had been found dead by a policeman in a snowdrift in Leonard street, New York City, in the winter of 1854. This catastrophe had so worked upon him that, for the first time in his life, he had broken into verse—the verse in question being “Beautiful Snow.” This story he seemed to regard as proving conclusively that he wrote the poem.
It is the hard fate of anthologists that they have to decide such controversies as this, and when William Cullen Bryant was compiling his Library of Poetry and Song, he assembled all the evidence and decided in favor of Mr. Watson. There has never been any serious reason to question his verdict.
John Whitaker Watson was a prolific writer, a hack of Grub Street, but “Beautiful Snow” is the only thing of his that still lives—if it can be said to live. He was born in New York City ​on October 14, 1824, graduated at Columbia College and studied medicine, but drifted into journalism and eventually developed into a writer of sentimental verse and of sensational serials for the popular weeklies. He died in New York, July 18, 1890.
About 1884, a reporter for the New York World discovered that Mr. Watson lived in “a neat brick house on Twenty-second Street,” and secured from him the story of his famous poem. It was written in November, 1858, at the house of Mr. Sam Colt, at Hartford, Conn., and was mailed next morning to Harper’s Weekly. The Weekly accepted it and sent the author a check for $15, which he considered very liberal. In 1868, he sold the copyright to it and twenty-five other poems to Turner Brothers & Co., of Philadelphia, for the sum of $500, and these poems were published in the volume referred to above. The book was very successful and more than 30,000 copies were sold the first year. But various other ventures proved so disastrous that the firm failed, and Mr. Watson’s volume passed into the hands of T. B. Peterson & Co., also of Philadelphia. They, so Mr. Watson alleged, gathered up enough of his poems to make a second volume, altered the title of the leading one, and published them wholly without his knowledge. He knew nothing of the book until he happened ​upon it in a Broadway bookstore, and he never received a cent for it.
But it is when he relates his experiences with the various claimants of the honor of having written this masterpiece that he is most interesting.
“There have been so many authors of ‘Snow,’” says Mr. Watson, “that I only admit myself to myself as one of them. The first who came prominently to the front was one McMasters, a portrait painter, who wrote a letter to the Sunday Times modestly admitting that he was the long-sought author. Accompanied by a friend, I went around to see him, and he repeated his assertion to me, declaring that he could produce proofs of it in two weeks. I gave him two months, and I guess he is looking for them yet. That was twenty years ago, and I have never heard of him since.
“Then Elizabeth Akers and Dora Shaw and Hen Faxon took spells at it through the newspapers, not exactly claiming it, but letting it be known that the author was not a great distance off. I believe the poem has never yet been openly claimed by any one possessing any real literary talent,” Mr. Watson added, thoughtfully, though of course without any suspicion of why this was so!
“But the most wonderful of all these claimants,” Mr. Watson pursued, “and the one who ​gave me the most serious annoyance was a rascal calling himself William H. Sigourney, and professing to be a nephew of the husband of Lydia Huntley Sigourney. He somehow secured an endorsement from the Galaxy Magazine, and on the strength of this traveled through the country making addresses at country fairs, reciting ‘Beautiful Snow’ and swindling the country people out of anything he could. He ran his career for several years, and every little while my eyes were gratified by a newspaper paragraph to the effect that the author of ‘Beautiful Snow’ had been arrested somewhere for obtaining goods under false pretenses, or picking pockets.
“There wasn’t much inducement for me at that time to proclaim myself as the author; but one day I saw in the Philadelphia Ledger the announcement that the author of ‘Beautiful Snow’ had shot himself and died on the Bloomingdale road the day before. I fancied I was rid of the fellow at last, but when I came back to New York I was disappointed to find that the report had originated with the Evening Post, and had been written by a man who had claimed to be the author of the poem and who, when threatened with arrest for some rascality, took this means of avoiding it.
“A few months later the papers announced that the author of ‘Beautiful Snow’ had been ​arrested for robbing a Mr. Page of $300. I had the curiosity to go to the Tombs to see him, and he told me his real name and history. What happened to him after that I don’t know.”
Like all other one-poem men, Mr. Watson was convinced that Fate had done him a great injustice by linking his name to a single poem, and consigning all his other work to oblivion.
“I am not only the author of ‘Beautiful Snow,’” he protested, “but of ‘The Dying Soldier,’ ‘Farmer Brown,’ ‘Ring Down the Drop,’ and of many others as good or better. Why they are not equally famous I cannot imagine. I think I can say without egotism that my poems originated a new taste or school, of which Trowbridge, Carleton and a few others are worthy followers.”
But a careful examination of the contents of “Beautiful Snow and Other Poems,” reveals nothing but a dreary waste. And yet, an editorial note at the back of the volume, dated March, 1871, proclaims the sixth edition, and calls attention to the interesting fact that two of the poems contained in the book, “Beautiful Snow” and “The Dying Soldier,” “were read upon one night, a few months since, to audiences varying from one thousand to four thousand, in seven of the great cities of the country, including New York, Philadelphia and Boston!”
Yes, it was the Age of Plush!