GRAVENHURST DESERVES THIS RECOGNITION - BUT HOW TO USE IT?
THE GOOD RELATIONS WE COULD FOSTER IN THE LITERARY WORLD
"THE STREAM TO THE TREE - I SHINE, YOU SHADE, AND SO THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD IS MADE."
"RESTED OR MOVED UPON ITS BROW, AND LO! IT SOFTENS INTO BEAUTY NOW - BLOOMS LIKE A FLOWER. WITH US 'TIS MUCH THE SAME - FROM MAN TO MAN, AS THE DEEP SHADOWS ROLL, BREAKS FORTH THE BEAUTY OF THE HUMAN SOUL."
"I WAS QUITE ALONE WITH MY LOVE. I GOT ON THE BED BEHIND HIM, THE BETTER TO PROP HIM, IN WHAT SEEMED AN EASY SLEEP - THE HANDS AND FEET STILL WARM. HIS HEAD PASSED GRADUALLY FROM THE PILLOW TO MY BREAST, AND THERE THE CHERISHED HEAD RESTED FIRMLY; THE BREATHING GREW GENTLER AND GENTLER. NEVER SHALL I FORGET THE GREAT AWE, THE BROODING PRESENCE WITH WHICH THE ROOM WAS FILLED. MY HEART LEAPT WILDLY WITH A NEW SENSATION, BUT IT WAS NOT FEAR. ONLY IT WOULD HAVE SEEMED PROFANE TO UTTER EVEN MY ILLIMITABLE LOVE, OR TO CALL UPON HIS NAME. THE HEAD GREW DAMP AND VERY HEAVY; MY ARMS WERE UNDER HIM. THEN THE SLEEP GREW QUIET, AND AS THE CHURCH CLOCK BEGAN TO STRIKE TEN, I CAUGHT A LITTLE SIGH, SUCH AS A NEW-BORN INFANT MIGHT GIVE IN WAKING - NOT A TREMOR, NOT A THRILL OF THE FRAME, AND THEN VI CAME BACK WITH CLARA'S NURSE, (WHO HAVE A PECULIAR LOVE AND ADMIRATION FOR HIM, I HAD SAID MIGHT COME UP). I TOLD THEM HE WAS GONE, AND I THANKED GOD FOR THE PERFECT PEACE IN WHICH HE PASSED AWAY. HE WAS BURIED IN THE BRIGHTON CEMETERY, IN A SPOT AT PRESENT STILL SECLUDED, AND OVER WHICH THE LARKS SING JOYOUSLY. THERE, A PLAIN GREY GRANITE HEADSTONE RISES TO HIS PURE AND CHERISHED MEMORY, WITH JUST HIS NAME AND TWO DATES, AND THIS ONE LINE, LONG ASSOCIATED WITH HIM IN MY MIND, AND WHICH ALL WHO KNEW HIM HAVE FELT TO BE APPROPRIATE. 'HIS SOUL WAS LIKE A STAR, AND DWELT APART'."
THE TWO LINES OF POETRY COMMENCING TODAY'S BLOG, WERE WRITTEN BY WILLIAM HENRY SMITH. THE PASSAGE ABOVE WAS COMPOSED BY LUCY SMITH, ON THE PASSING OF HER POET / PHILOSOPHER HUSBAND, AND HIS BURIAL IN BRIGHTON, ENGLAND.
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO, THIS COMING JULY / AUGUST, THE NEW POST OFFICE IN OUR HAMLET BY THE BAY, WAS GIVEN THE TITLE "GRAVENHURST," AFTER A BOOK WRITTEN BY WILLIAM HENRY SMITH, FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1862, THE YEAR W.D. LESUEUR GRANTED OUR POSTAL STATUS. HE BORROWED THE NAME, FROM A BOOK HE HAD REVIEWED (MOONLIGHTING AS A LITERARY CRITIC), ENTITLED "GRAVENHURST; OR THOUGHTS ON GOOD AND EVIL," BY MR. SMITH. WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN CONSIDERED A GREAT HONOR, AND A SIGNIFICANT LITERARY PROVENANCE, WAS NEVER FULLY EXPLAINED BY LESUEUR, AND THUS, FOR MOST OF THE PAST ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS, NOT MUCH WAS KNOWN ABOUT THE AUTHOR, OR THE HONOR PROVIDED TO AN UNSUSPECTING HAMLET IN CANADA.
IN 2000, I PUT TOGETHER A SMALL RESEARCH PROJECT ABOUT WILLIAM SMITH, AND PUBLISHED A SEVEN PART SERIES ON THE AUTHOR, AND WHAT IT HAS, AND SHOULD MEAN TO THE PRESENT TOWN OF GRAVENHURST. ALTHOUGH IT WAS ALLUDED TO IN THE 1967 PUBLICATION OF "LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS," IT STILL NOTED THERE WAS A POSSIBILITY, THE NAME OF OUR TOWN COULD HAVE BEEN TAKEN FROM A BOOK BY WASHINGTON IRVING, ENTITLED "BRACEBRIDGE HALL." AS I'VE WRITTEN ABOUT MANY TIMES BEFORE, THIS WASN'T THE CASE, EXCEPT IN BRACEBRIDGE, WHERE THE NAME WAS INDEED TAKEN FROM THE IRVING BOOK, IN 1864, ALSO BY POSTAL AUTHORITY, W. D. LESUEUR. IN 2000 WE MANAGED TO PURCHASE A COPY OF THE SECOND, "MEMORIAL" EDITION, FOR THE TOWN, FROM THE 1870'S, WHICH IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE IT CONTAINS THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION BY LUCY SMITH, OF HER HUSBAND'S PASSING. I DID PROVIDE THE TOWN A COPY OF THE SERIES OF ARTICLES THAT HAD APPEARED IN THE GRAVENHURST BANNER. SINCE, THE HISTORY OF SMITH AND THE NAMING OF GRAVENHURST, HAS APPEARED IN MUSKOKA TODAY AND CURIOUS; THE TOURIST GUIDE. STILL NOT ENOUGH TO STIR MUCH INTEREST.
"There comes a time when neither fear nor hope are necessary to the pious man; but he loves righteousness for righteousness' sake, and love is all in all. It is not joy at escape from future perdition that he now feels; nor is it hope for some untold happiness in the future: it is a present rapture of piety, and resignation, and love - a present that fills eternity.
"It asks nothing, it fears nothing; it loves and it has no petition to make. God takes back His little child unto Himself - a little child that has no fear, and is all trust."
The lines above were penned by William Smith, a writer well respected during his period in England. His wife, in her memorial, wrote about how full of affection he was for his young days. "(Hammersmith, England) Here is another glimpse of the enjoyments of those early days. The cheerful drawing room in the Hammersmith home had a window at both ends. Round the one that looked into the garden, clustered the white blossoms or hung the luscious - a swan-egg - the like of which was never met in later years! From the other window the children could watch the following spectacle, which my husband evidently enjoyed recalling in a notice of 'Mr. Knight's Reminiscences, published in 1864'." William Smith himself, writes, from his childhood experiences, "Very pleasant is this looking back over a period of history through which we too have lived. Give a boy a telescope, and if he is far enough away from home, the first or the greatest delight he has, in the use of it, is to point it back, to the house he lives in. To see the palings of his own garden, to see his father at work in it, or a younger brother playing in it, is a far greater treat than if you were to show him the coast of France or any other distant object. And so it is with the past in time. If the telescope of the historian brings back to us, events through which we have lived, and which were already fading away in the memory, he gives to us quite a peculiar pleasure."
One of his childhood reminiscences I enjoyed reading, addresses the matter of changes in the means of transportation, progress on wheels and steam innovation: "This great revolution in our mode of traveling, the substitution of the steam engine for the horse, will soon be matter of history, and older men will begin to record, with that peculiar zest which belongs to the recollection of youth, the aspect which the highway roads leading out of London, presented in their time. The railway-train rushing by you at its full speed is sublime - it deserves no timid epithet. You stand perhaps in the country, on one of those little bridges thrown over the line for the convenience of the farmer, who would else find his fields hopelessly bisected. A jet stream is seen on the horizon, a whir of a thousand wheels grows louder and louder on the ear, and there rushes under your feet the very realization of Milton's dream, who saw the chariot of God, instinct with motion, self-impelled, thundering over the plains of heaven. You look around, and already in the distant landscape the triumphal train is bearing its beautiful standard of ever-rising clouds, white as the highest that rest stationary in the sky, and of exquisitely involved movement. For an instant the whole country is animated as if by the stir of battle; when the spectacle has quite passed, how inexpressibly flat and desolate and still, have our familiar fields become! Nothing seems to have a right to exist that can be so still and stationary."
Smith writes, "Yet grand as this spectacle is, we revert with pleasure to some boyish recollections of the high road, and to picturesque effects produced by quite other means. We are transported in imagination to a bay-window that commanded the great western road - the Bath Road, as people at the time often called it. Every evening came, in rapid succession, the earth tingling with the musical thread of their horses, seven mail-coaches out of London. The dark red coach, the scarlet guard standing up in his solitary little dickey behind the tramp of the horses, the ring of the horns - can one ever forget them. For some miles out of London, the guard was kept on his feet, blowing on his horn, to warn all slower vehicles to make way for his Majesty's mails. There was a turnpike within sight of us; how the horses dashed through it! With not the least abatement of speed. If some intolerable blunderer stopped by the way, and that royal coachman had to draw up his team, making the splinter-bars rattle together, we looked upon it as almost an act of treason. If the owner of that blockading cart had been immediately led off to execution, we boys should have though he had but his just deserts. Our mysterious seven were still more exciting to the imagination when, in the dark of winter nights, only the two vivid lamps could be seen borne along by the trampling coursers. No darkness checked the speed of the mail; a London fog which brought ordinary vehicles to a standstill, could not altogether subdue our royal mails. The procession came flaring with torches, men shouting before it, and a man with a huge link at the head of each horse. It was a thrilling and a somewhat fearful scene."
Other than the kindness shown by the publishers of the Gravenhurst Banner, Muskoka Today, and Curious; The Tourist Guide, the only time I was asked to do a full presentation on William Henry Smith, and his connection to Gravenhurst, Ontario, was at a lecture series sponsored by the Muskoka Lakes Museum, in Port Carling. The theme that night was, "Why no one cares about William Smith," or why Bracebridge has little or no interest in their literary provenance, to Washington Irving. So the small crowd in attendance heard about two years of wasted research, on my part, to provide a link no one wanted. Pretty sad right? Two literary shining stars, in world literature, and regardless how aggressively or enthusiastically I pitched the ideas, to council and the business association, on ways to capitalize, on this provenance, of which they are entitled to exploit, I never got five minutes of council time in either town. You'd think that would be a clear message, to "buzz off!" So what's different in 2012? Well, in Gravenhurst, we are presently celebrating 125 years since incorporation. A municipal thing! Historic! Not enough to warrant a parade. But I think I read that we're having one anyway. Yet by golly, having a 150 year anniversary, this summer, to commemorate the naming of our town, (by adopting the name "Gravenhurst" for our post office, ) back in 1862, must be worth half a parade, a crumb of ceremonial cake, or a single nearly deflated ballon that thanks W.D. LeSueur, for connecting us to William Henry Smith. Watch. The only way you're going to find out much about this Smith fellow, is via this blogsite. I will be writing a special feature for the July issue of Curious; The Tourist Guide, which you can find online or at shops around Muskoka.
For posterity, if nothing else, I intend on publishing, online, a meaty history, with a lot of provenance included, about the handiwork of LeSueur, and the reasons we should all be honored, to have the name of our town associated, with the legacy of one of the world's finest writers. I plan to launch the series of articles, beginning on Canada Day. I'm hoping by this time, that we have been successful on some of the British contacts we're presently trying to make, to find out even more about Mr. Smith. With all the other Royalty Celebrations going on this year, and in Canada, we'll have our own taste of Britain right here in Gravenhurst. I don't have money to throw a party or anything, or get a plaque made up, but I hope we can make what appears online, robust enough, and festive, to attract a few readers. I think it's important. I'm betting I can convince you, just how important. Just watch me. Right here. On Ted Currie's Gravenhurst blog. We'll hoist a make-believe pint, in the pub of choice, to a fine poet…..we really should know.
At a time when editorial cheap shots keep ricocheting about, in this town, and we're looking for inspiration, and economic potential to harness, maybe it's time we got off the traditional history thing……and delved into some really neat stuff we haven't thought about before. I would love Gravenhurst Councillors to join me for this presentation. It's free. I'm not asking for rent forgiveness, a grant, a vote of confidence, or a discussion in my honor. I'm looking for a willingness to challenge status quo. Challenge the way we think about the history of our town. It's not as black and white as you might have thought. We have a special literary connection, to England, and to a host of other significant writers of the time, who were keen colleagues of William Henry Smith. If you like literature, old England, Canada, and a good story, please continue to watch this site.
Thank you for joining today's blog submission. There will be lots more on Mr. Smith in the coming months. Please join me again soon.
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