CHAPTER 21
Samuel A. Clarke
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
SHEFFIELD.
At Salem in 1872 was printed a 40-page pamphlet that contains as much poetry of high excellence and as little that is not excellent as any similar quantity of pages ever published in Oregon. The man who wrote it was 45 years old. In his preface he asked, with eagerness but with dignity, for a sign of favor that he might be encouraged to quit daily journalism and give himself to literature. What was the answer? In the Library of the Oregon Historical Society are 12 thick scrapbooks of the things he wrote and 17 bound volumes of newspapers that he edited. On the shelves of that library and many libraries are two volumes of a history on Oregon, accepted as one of the best we have, completed and published when he was 78. Such was the answer: his finer prose long deferred, and never another volume of poetry, not even another in the thinness of 40 pages—and the first one not included in the listings of Smith's Pacific Northwest Americana, and owned by fewer libraries in the state than can be counted on the fingers of a single hand.
The little volume is Sounds by the Western Sea and Other Poems. The author was Samuel A. Clarke, known by many for his important contributions to Oregon as a pioneer, journalist and historian, but, in a land of unusual sensitivity to poetry, strangely forgotten and never fully recognized as a poet.
It is to be expected that even such good
