In this materialistic age of steam and electricity, when, in the race of life, men and women strive and jostle each other in the endeavor to reach some longed-for goal, and there seems scarce time to take breath, much less to rest, it is a happy and a hopeful augury that there are singers to whom even this jaded and over-eager Nineteenth Century will pause to listen.
Human nature is human nature still, and there are chords in the human heart which ever respond to the touch of the player who understands by an unerring instinct of sympathy the secret of their harmonies.
It is almost a truism that, in the childhood of peoples, poetry was born. When the world was young, when men were untrammeled by the conventionalities that come of age, knowledge and experience, speech became instinctively poetic in its endeavor to express feelings, hopes, desires and passions, and necessarily borrowed its imagery from the varying phenomena of nature. In the development of time, ideas more exact took the place of the old, half-understood impressions which men struggled to make intelligible to one another, and language became less poetic, losing the abundance of metaphor and simile which were its primitive characteristics.
There remain, however, poetic springs deep in human consciousness; and though thought and sentiment may be intelligently expressed in prose, it is the welding of thought to rhythm, the union of the pleasures of intellect and of sense which appeal most strongly to our perception of the beautiful.
In proportion as poetry is spontaneous, as it weans us from the commonplace and calls us to the ideal, it is true to its mission; and the poet, to deserve the name, must lift us out of ourselves and into higher spheres of thinking.
Prominent among the singers of our own time and country, whose verse has such power to awaken thought and aspiration, will be recognized Florence Earle Coates. The publisher of few long poems—for her gift is the lyric one, and she holds, with Edgar Allan Poe, that good poems are almost necessarily short—her work yet appeals in subtle fashion to the hearts of her readers, and has both popular and enduring qualities.
Mrs. Coates is one of the literary women of whom Philadelphia may justly be proud, for in it she was born, in one of the historic streets which, in the olden days, when the city was mapped out in rigid straight lines, received titles from the forest trees, and left us such names as Cedar and Pine and Spruce and Walnut and Chestnut and Mulberry as evidence that the grave founders were fond of nature, though such poetical nomenclature could hardly have been expected from the staid followers of Penn.
The child came into the world with a goodly heritage of honorable repute from ancestors who sought in the New World a liberty of conscience denied them in the Old. The lineal descendant of four of the Pilgrims of the "Mayflower"—of Thomas Angell (one of the five companions of Roger Williams, who, sailing with him from Massachusetts in an open boat, landed at State Rock, and with him founded the city of Providence), of Christopher Hussey, Tristram Coffin, Ralph Earle, Thomas Macey, Peter Folger (grandfather of Benjamin Franklin), of Captain Isaac Wayne (father of Major-General Anthony Wayne), and of the Arnolds of Rhode Island—names all associated with the earliest history of our country, and with the love of political and religious liberty—one would naturally expect from her similar enthusiasms and aspirations; and, in fact, a strong love of personal, political and religious freedom has characterized all the descendants of these men, down to the present day.
Though born in the Quaker City, Mrs. Coates was educated chiefly in New England, under the direction of the distinguished reformer, teacher and orator, Theodore D. Weld, of whom Wendell Phillips once remarked, that he was "the most eloquent man he had ever heard speak." Subsequently she continued her studies in a Convent of the Sacred Heart in France, and later, in the City of Brussels, where she lived for more than a year.
As a child, the Bible and Shakspere formed her favorite reading, and a child brought up on such mental fare, is not apt to go astray in after life in the matter of intellectual food.
While at school she so devoted herself to her studies, availing herself of every advantage offered, that it became matter of comment; and it was written of her by one of her teachers: "She toils terribly." Having exceptional musical gifts, Mrs. Coates gave much attention to that art, studying under the best masters both here and in Europe.