Born at Paisley, Scotland, July 6, 1766; died at Philadelphia, Aug. 23, 1813. A Scotch-American ornithologist. In early life he was a weaver; was prosecuted and imprisoned for writing lampoons (in the dispute between the weavers and manufacturers at Paisley); emigrated to the United States in 1794; labored as a peddler, schoolmaster, and editor of an edition of Reess Cyclopædia; and made many pedestrian and other expeditions through the country. He published American Ornithology (7 vols. 18081813; vols. 8 and 9 edited after his death; supplement by C. L. Bonaparte, 1825), poems (1791), The Foresters (1805), etc. His collected works were edited by Grosart (1876).
This Monument | |
covers the Remains of | |
Alexander Wilson, | |
Author of the | |
AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY. | |
He was born in Renfrewshire, Scotland, | |
on the 6th of July, 1766; | |
Emigrated to the United States | |
in the year 1794; | |
and died in Philadelphia, | |
of the Dysentery, | |
on the 23d of August, 1813, | |
Aged 47. |
The library of Wilson occupied but a small space. On casting my eyes, after his decease, over the ten or a dozen volumes of which it was composed, I was grieved to find that he had been the owner of only one work on Ornithology, and that was Bewicks British Birds. For the use of the first volume of Turtons Linnæus, he was indebted to the friendship of Mr. Thomas Say; the Philadelphia Library supplied him with Latham.
One fair morning I was surprised by the sudden entrance into our counting-room, at Louisville, of Mr. Alexander Wilson, the celebrated author of the American Ornithology, of whose existence I had never until that moment been appraised. This happened in March 1810. How well do I remember him, as then he walked up to me! His long, rather hooked nose, the keenness of his eye, and his prominent cheek-bones, stamped his countenance with a peculiar character. His dress, too, was of a kind not usually seen in that part of the country; a short coat, trowsers, and a waistcoat of gray cloth. His stature was not above middle size. He had two volumes under his arm; and, as he approached the table at which I was working, I discovered something like astonishment in his countenance.
Mr. Bradford, the same liberal patron who enabled me to study painting, enabled Wilson to publish the most interesting account of birds, and to illustrate it with the best representations of their forms and colours, that has ever appeared. Wilson was engaged by Mr. Bradford as tutor to his sons, and as editor of the American edition of Reess Cyclopædia, while at the same time he was advancing his Ornithology for publication. I assisted him to colour some of its first plates. We worked from birds which he had shot and stuffed, and I well remember the extreme accuracy of his drawings, and how carefully he had counted the number of scales on the tiny legs and feet of his subject. He looked like a bird; his eyes were piercing, dark, and luminous, and his nose shaped like a beak. He was of a spare bony form, very erect in his carriage, inclining to be tall; and with a light elastic step, he seemed perfectly qualified by nature for his extraordinary pedestrian achievements.
His personal appearance was that of a modest, rather retiring man, of good countenance, not decidedly Scotch, but still with a cast of it, rather more like a New England Congregational clergyman in his black dress than any other description I can give. He was held in great esteem for probity, gentle manners, and accomplishments in his special branch of natural science.
Thus closed a life and a work which, it is no exaggeration to say, are without a parallel. When Wilsons deprivations are borne in mind,that his early instruction was scant and contemptible; that, as a boy, he was put at an uncongenial occupation, which formed his means of livelihood through nearly half his days; that his was a lifelong struggle with difficulties, which only the sheer indomitable resolution of a man never cheerful or sanguine enabled him to surmount; that he was thirty years of age when, in a strange land, he effected his own education by becoming the instructor of others; that he was thirty-three when he began the study of ornithology, with scarcely any resources beyond his own powers of observation, and the practice of drawing without any previously suspected aptitude; that he was forty years old before an opportunity disclosed itself for the commencement of his work, forty-two when he first accomplished publication, and only forty-seven when his life was closed,it must be admitted that few careers so brief have been equally productive.
Poems
In his humor and feeling Wilson, as a poet, belongs to the family of Burns. He addresses his friends in verse with the old loving feeling of Scottish brotherhood, has his song for love and beauty, and his similar choice of subject in ludicrous tale or ballad, with a smarting sense of wrong and poverty; while an early observation in natural history, and his pursuit of descriptive poetry, belong especially to Wilson the naturalist
. In that fine descriptive poem of the Foresters, in which he describes an October journey through Pennsylvania, and across the Alleghanies from Philadelphia to Niagara, the reader may have a true enjoyment of his poetic tastes and of his ardent love of nature and adventure.
I have placed Watty and Meg, or the Wife Reformed: a Tale in the fore-front of the Poems. It is unique in our literature. Christs Kirk on the Green and the Midden Fecht have bits perhaps as effective in homely portraiture. But as a whole it stands alone for rough, coarse, realistic painting. It isnt altogether such a scene or incident as many would elect to paint, any more than one would those drinking groups which in Ostade and Teniers give renown to a gallery; but having been chosen I know not where to look for such raciness, vigour, genuineness. Only a native-born Scotchman can take in the flavour of its thoroughly Scotch wording and motif. But he is an emasculated Scot who does not relish it all through. Hector Macneils Will and Jean is a thin, vapid, namby-pamby production beside it.
More famous though he certainly is in other fields, the great American ornithologist is also a claimant for a place of honour among the poets of his native country . Watty and Meg, from the popularity of its subjectthe reform of a scolding wife by a threat of leaving herhas generally been placed first among Wilsons compositions. Notwithstanding its high merits, however, of vividness and realism, it is handicapped heavily by the four-line trochaic measure in which it is written, and it does not appear unjust to say that it contains nothing which might not have been as well expressed in prose. The best qualities of Wilsons geniusthe graphic touches by which whole scenes of the peasant life in Scotland are brought vividly before the eye, and a happiness of epithet which gives the freshness in individuality to its workare to be found, with a higher quality of art, in his slightly longer piece, The Laurel Disputed.
He commended his wares even in poetic broadsides, and dealt not ungraciously with Scottish dialect at a time when Burns was singing; indeed his longest dialect poem was for some time attributed to Burnsonly by the unwary, however. Tis hard to listen contentedly to the chirping of a sparrow, when a thrush (like Burns) fills the air with melody. But Wilsons verses, written on this side of the water, after he had made a tramp across the Alleghanies, are not to be scorned, and are without the grossness which belongs to many of his dialect poems.
In Alexander Wilsons The Foresters (1809), the humble home of a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer is pictured with courageous truth of detail . In its neat perspective this sketch of a landscape as seen from a mountain-top resembles passages from Cowper.
American Ornithology, 180813
The Ornithology of this naturalist, we look upon as quite a magnificent affair for America. The plates are good; colouring fine; typography capital; editorial matter excellent.
All his pencil or pen has touched is established incontestably: by the plate, description, and history he has always determined his bird so obviously as to defy criticism and prevent future mistake . We may add, without hesitation, that such a work as he has published in a new country is still a desideratum in Europe.
It is as an ornithologist that Wilsons fame will last for after ages . Wilson was an observing naturalist; and, perhaps, Nature never had a more ardent pursuer. His object was to illustrate the different birds in their various states, as closely to the truth as possible, and to describe those parts of their manners which he could from actual observation, throwing aside all hearsay evidence and seldom indulging in any theories of classification, or the scale they hold in Nature. It is from these circumstances that his work derives its worth; the facts can be confidently quoted as authentic, and their value depended on in our reasonings upon their historytheir migrationstheir geographical distribution.
There are few examples to be found in literary history of resolution equal to that of Wilson. Though he was made fully aware, both by his friends and his own reflections, of the difficulty of the enterprise in which he was engaged, his heart never for a moment failed him. By his agreement with his publisher, he bound himself to furnish the drawings and descriptions for the work, indeed everything, except the mechanical execution. To procure the materials, he was obliged to encounter heavy expenses; and the money which he received for coloring the plates, was the only revenue from which he defrayed them. It is easy to imagine the difficulties which he must have encountered; but his success was complete; and though he did not live to enjoy, he certainly anticipated, what has come to pass; that his work would always be regarded as a subject of pride by his adopted country, and would secure immortal honor for him whose name it bears.
Alexander Wilson was the great pioneer in this branch of American science; and who that appreciates his chaste and eloquent style, his accurate and happy delineation of a class of the most lovely objects in nature, can fail to experience the greatest delight in reviewing the pages of the American Ornithology?
One of the most splendid works of Natural History ever produced . No learned society gave it encouragement; no distinguished name in the world of science was its author. A poor Scotch peddler, who had left his native country in the hope of bettering his fortune, was the writer and the artist who, unaided except by the general public support, produced the most superb book of its class that the world had then seen . Well did he deserve his hard-earned fame. As a writer he has a merit which seldom belongs to systematic naturalists; his descriptions are at once accurate and brilliant. He looks at Nature with the eye of a poet; he describes with an exactness which might satisfy the most rigid classifier.
The types, which were very beautiful, were cast in America; and though at that time paper was largely imported, he (Mr. Bradford) determined that the paper should be of American manufacture; and I remember that Amies, the paper-maker, carried his patriotism so far that he declared that he would use only American rags in making it. The result was that the book far surpassed any other that had appeared in that country, and I apprehend, though it may have been equalled in typography, has not before or since been equalled in its matter or its plates. Bewick comes nearest to it; but his accounts of birds are not so full and complete, and his figures, admirably characteristic and complete as they are in form, have not the advantage of the much larger scale of Wilsons, or of colour. Unfortunately Wilsons book was necessarily expensive, and therefore not remunerative; but nothing discouraged him.
Like Audubon, and like every great Ornithologist worthy of the name, Wilson was a poet as well as a man of science. He had an eye to see the beauty of the birds life as well as of his plumage, and records the doings and ways of his little friends with the fondness of a lover and the imagination of an artist. Wilsons intense love for his subject and the intrinsic beauty of the theme itself seem to have had a transforming and educating influence on the man. When writing on some favorite bird he is no longer the mere scientific naturalist, but rises into the region of poetic fancy. There is nothing in Irving or Goldsmith finer, as mere literary efforts, than some of Wilsons descriptions of the birds of his acquaintance.
His labors were not merely in a field in which he had to open a new path, but where the steps that had been taken were false and misleading, and in which there were but few fellow-travelers. His journeys, largely performed on foot, exceeded ten thousand miles. His work was unappreciated by those to whom he had the clearest right to appeal, and patronage was withheld by almost every incumbent of exalted position. Nevertheless, though discouraged by neglect, and hampered not merely by poverty, but by the necessity of succoring those in still deeper need than himself, he both laid the foundation for the study of natural history on this continent and bequeathed to his successors the outlines for its subsequent development; and he described the habits of American birds with fidelity to truth, graphic vigor, and a poetical realization of the beauties of nature.
Wilson was no compiler; he took his facts from his own observations, or the accounts of those who had known the birds for a lifetime.
General
In the strictest sense of the term, Wilson was a man of genius, his perceptions were quick, his impressions vivid; a bright glow of feeling breathes through his compositions. In the professed walks of poetry his attempts were not often fortunate, but his prose writings partake of the genuine poetic spirit; a lively fancy, exuberance of thought, and minute observation of the natural world, are strongly indicated in whatever has flowed from his pen.
Alexander Wilson was a remarkable man. He was a great naturalist, a fair poet, and an honest, upright gentleman, bearing his hard won, tardy honors and fame as gracefully as he had borne poverty and obscurity. His American Ornithology must ever remain a classic.
Wilsons life and writings will always appeal to the general reader. Even to the ornithologist, the personality of the man and the vitality of his work are the chief charms. The poem on the Fish-Hawk is full of the strong, fresh breeze and local color of the beaches, and that on The BluebirdWilsons Bluebirdbreathes the free, open air of the country-side.