Poet and humorist; born at Highgate, Vt., June 2, 1816; graduated at Middlebury College 1839; was admitted to the bar at St. Albans 1843; practiced law in Franklin County 1843–50; was editor of the Burlington Sentinel 1850–56; was State’s attorney of Vermont one year, after which he devoted himself chiefly to literature and to popular lecturing; was Democratic candidate for Governor 1859 and 1860. Author of several volumes of humorous poems, the longest of which were delivered at college commencements and other anniversary occasions. His published works include “Progress” (1846); “New Rape of the Lock;” “The Proud Miss McBride;” “The Money King” (1859); “Clever Stories of Many Nations;” “The Masquerade” (1866); and “Leisure Day Rhymes” (1875). More than forty editions of his collected poems have been issued in the U. S. and in England. Died at Albany, N. Y., Mar. 31, 1887.
| O genial Saxe, whose radiant wit | |
| Flashed like the lightning from the sky, | |
| But, though each flash as keenly hit, | |
| Wounded but what deserved to die— | |
| Alas! the cloud that shrouds thy day | |
| In gathering darkness, fold on fold, | |
| Serves not as background for the play | |
| Of those bright gleams that charmed of old. | |
* * * * * | |
| Yet charms not now his blithesome lay, | |
| Nor flowery mead “in verdure clad.” | |
| The world that laughed when thou wast gay, | |
| Now weeps to know that thou art sad. |
One of the first things he did after moving to Brooklyn was to purchase a lot for family burial. At that time he was surrounded by an interesting family—a loving wife, one of the noblest women that ever lived, two sons, and three daughters. His fame was fast increasing and he was everywhere lionized and courted. Life to him then was all sunshine and smiles, but the shadows settled fast over that happy home, and to-day the mother and her three daughters sleep side by side in that Greenwood lot, and a son rests in our own Rural Cemetery. Sorrowing and suffering did their work, and the loved poet is now ending his days apart from the world, a broken-hearted man. He came back to this city alone, in 1881, shortly after his wife’s death, and is now living with his son on State Street, though few of the good people of Albany know of his presence in their midst. Sickness has bowed the rugged frame and enfeebled his step. Lines of care are furrowed across his brow, and age has sprinkled the silver in his hair. He sees no visitors and rarely leaves his room. Longfellow, Emerson, and other of the writers of his day lived to a ripe age and died in the midst of their work, but Saxe still lives on at the age of seventy, though dead to the world, dead to literature, and dead to the thousands of friends whose hearts yearn to comfort and cheer the man whose genius and wit have lightened so may homes as, in his declining years, he nears the evening sunset.
Saxe was the author of some poems as witty as any ever written by Dr. Holmes, and some of his punning pieces are not excelled even by anything of Tom Hood’s. In his younger days, as he began to be appreciated in society, he not infrequently exhibited something of natural conceit. A friend met him one morning as he was coming from the sanctum of the “Boston Post,” to which paper he was a frequent contributor as well as to the “Knickerbocker,” and upon asking him as to what he was doing, got this reply: “I have just left with Colonel Greene the finest sonnet that has been written since the days of Sir John Suckling.”
General
The two principal poems [“The Money King and Other Poems”] … have the characteristic merits and faults of the class of poems to which they belong. Their versification is smooth and easy, their humor is genial, and is good-natured. If they unfold only simple and obvious truths, they enforce those truths by well-chosen illustrations, and their tone is always healthful.
Mr. Saxe writes with facility, is intent mainly on jests and epigrams, and amuses himself and his readers by clever hits at the fashions and follies of the time. His good-natured satire does not cleave to the depths, nor is his humor of that quality which reaches to the sources of feeling, and which gives us the surprises of an April day. But he is level with the popular apprehension, and has made his name more familiarly known, in all parts of the country, than that of any of our comic versifiers.
Until his fame was somewhat overshadowed by Artemus Ward, he might have been called the most popular humorous writer of America…. Mr. Saxe excels in light, easy verse, and in unexpected, if not absolutely punning, turns of expression. His more elaborate productions are not so successful. In the general style and effect of certain of his comic pieces he strongly reminds one of Thomas Hood. Saxe, it must be observed, is one of the very few thoroughly national poets, in this sense, that his themes and the atmosphere of his verse are almost exclusively American.
John G. Saxe owes his wide acceptance with the public not merely to the elasticity of his verse, the sparkle of his wit, and the familiarity of his topics, but to his power of diffusing the spirit of his own good humor. The unctuous satisfaction he feels in putting his mood of merriment into rhyme is communicated to his reader, so that, as it were, they laugh joyously together.
The abundant verse of Mr. Saxe belongs almost exclusively to the least poetical of the several orders into which poetry is sometimes classified—viz., the satirical and homiletic, which is made palatable only by natural lyric flow and grace, and by the frolic and gentle humor of its begetter. He ranked below Tom Hood and Dr. Holmes as a maker of light, often comic, ballads, pentameter satires, etc., and he had no claims as their rival in the more serious and imaginative composition of higher moods, on which something more than a passing reputation is founded. A few of his ditties, such as the “Rhyme of the Rail” and “The Briefless Barrister,” will long be found in the collections. For the most part he was a popular specimen of the college-society, lecture-room, dinner-table rhymster, that may be set down as a peculiarly American type and of a generation now almost passed away. His unsophisticated wit, wisdom, and verse, were understood and broadly relished by his audiences; his mellow personality made him justly a favorite; and his printed poems obtained a large and prolonged sale among American readers. That this should have been the case, when poetry of a higher class—like Dr. Parsons’s for example—failed of a general market, shows that, while good wine in the end may need no bush, its dispenser often must wait till the crowd have filled up the hostel that has the gayest sign.
John Godfrey Saxe is a genius by himself…. The verses by Saxe excel by virtue of plain, honest statement, and are even sometimes wanting in literary finish.
A poet who wrote society verse of not a little sparkle, although not equal to the best in that kind by Halleck and by Holmes.
He came far behind Hood and his other British models, but it was not discreditable to his countrymen that they should have bought and laughed over his numerous volumes. “The Proud Miss McBride,” “Rhyme of the Rail,” and “The Blind Men and the Elephant” have not lost their sprightliness.
