Born in Chester County, Pa., (1822–1872). In 1839 he entered the studio of a Cincinnati sculptor, intending to learn that branch of art. He quickly relinquished it for painting, however, and opened a studio of his own in New York, two years later. In 1846 he settled in Philadelphia, and in 1850 he went to Europe, working and studying in Florence and Rome. He made the latter city his home, with occasional visits to America, upon one of which, in 1872, he died in New York. Among the better known of his works are, “The Water-Sprite,” “The Lost Pleiad,” “The Star of Bethlehem,” “Sheridan and His Horse.” He began his career as a portrait painter with some success. His portrait of George Peabody is in the Peabody Institute, Baltimore. Mr. Claghorn, of Philadelphia, an early friend of Mr. Read’s, purchased a number of his pictures, painted at different periods, illustrating his progress from time to time. He was a very versatile genius. He occasionally turned his attention to sculpture in his maturity, and executed a bust of General Sheridan, which proved how successful he might have been with his chisel, had he so decided in his youth. By his poems, perhaps, he will be best known in the future. His “Sheridan’s Ride” is one of the most popular productions of the minor poets of America. His first book of “Poems” was published in 1847; his “Lays and Ballads” in 1848, “The New Pastoral” in 1855, “The Home by the Sea” in 1856. A collected edition of his works was published in 1860.
Personal
Next we went to the studio of Buchanan Read, the poet and painter, whose pictures, both in words and by the artist’s pencil and brush, are so enchanting. We had known each other in bright days “long ago,” and imagine his amazement to meet me here, when he believed me quietly at home in the far-away South. He was earnestly glad to see me, and showed me many very bewitching ideal pictures.
He painted many portraits, and a number of pictures which, while they cannot be reckoned great works of art, were still full of imagination and fancy and graceful thought. More could not have been expected of him as a painter with his divided ambition and want of early study and training. His pictures were poems, but without the mastery over the materials of expression which he possessed with his pen. His subjects were fine, but were rarely more finished than a cartoon or a vignette. They resembled the fantasies of Schwind and others of the German school, which were much more popular then than to-day…. While no one has described American scenery with more sympathy and truth in verse, Read’s paintings were all figure-pictures, either allegorical or romantic genre. As far as I am aware, he never tried to paint landscape but once, and then the work remained unfinished. I remember it as a conglomeration rather than a composition of the features of a wide extent of scenery. There were a stream and a bridge, a fisherman, trees, a grain-field and the reapers, village spire on a hill, and distant mountains—not one motif, but several, sketched in just as they occurred to him, like memoranda for a pastoral. In a poem he would have taken many stanzas to portray the scene. He forgot, in painting, that a landscape painter would have required an equal number of canvases…. He rose early and went to bed late. He loved to be hospitable and to occupy a high social rank. He was at his easel with the earliest sunlight, and burned midnight oil over poetical and philosophic schemes. He dreamed of painting great historical pictures, writing new epics, even of creating a new theology, and of being at the same time an amphytrion, a club-man and a politician.
The next time Buchanan Read came to us [1850] we had perused his fresh, invigorating poems, and were delighted to see him again. And now the ice being broken, we found him to be a very generous, grateful young man, possessing much original power and fine discrimination of art. He had been painting in Rossetti’s studio, and in constant intercourse with his host, William Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Woolner. As the day for his departure to Düsseldorf approached, a great gathering of all the P. R. B.’s took place, to commemorate his last evening in their midst. They read aloud his poetry, made much of him, and told such capital stories, that some of them rolled on the floor with laughter. But although they remained together until four or five in the morning, they could not part with him. He prolonged his stay, and as he absented himself in their company from his lodgings at Mr. Chapman’s, in the Strand, it was reported that the pre-Raphaelites had carried off Read in a chariot of fire.
General
Mr. Read’s shorter pieces have been collected and published in various forms, both in England and the United States, and have received the warmest commendations. They constitute indeed his highest claims to fame. His Lyrics are his greatest works. “Sheridan’s Ride” is one of the few things written during the heat of the war that is likely to survive. Others of his short pieces, though not so widely known as this, are hardly inferior to it in merit. No writer of the present age, except Tennyson, has so delicate a fancy, or such wonderful nicety in the use of words. This exquisite delicacy in the use of words is the more remarkable in Mr. Read’s case from the fact that his advantages of early education were very limited. It seems to grow out of the native poetical faculty of the man, which instinctively selects with infinitesimal precision exactly the right words to express its own airy fancies.
Few poets have ever excelled him in “occasional verses,” and many of his best poems were almost improvisations. “Sheridan’s Ride” was written in a few hours, and was recited by Mr. Murdoch at Pike’s Opera-House the same evening. The laying of the Atlantic Cable, the completion of a bridge, the celebration of a silver wedding, of a birthday or any anniversary was sufficient to inspire his Muse with fancies ever sympathetic and graceful. He once delivered a poem before the Mercantile Library Association in Cincinnati, the last lines of which were written while the carriage was waiting to convey him to the hall.
That Read was a poet there can be no doubt, but his poetry was a gift, not an art, and he failed in accomplishing what was clearly within his limitations through his inaptitude for reflection, investigation, and study. That Poetry is something other and better than the language in which it is expressed, and that in this language there is a choice of words that express lights and shades of meaning, is a truth that he never learned. He wrote from instinct and impulse, not from knowledge, and he wrote easily and carelessly. That some things are more poetical than others, while others are not poetical at all, was another truth that he never learned, for from the beginning to the end of his career all was grist that came to his mill. Every theme that struck him as adaptable to a poetic handling was handled by him without regard to its intellectual or emotional value, for the consideration and determination of which he was unfitted. Attracted by the surface of things, he reproduced their surfaces, content with what they revealed, and careless of what they concealed. Moved by fancy rather than feeling, his verse was often smothered by the fancies with which it was bestrewn.
He was distinctly a minor poet, but some of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like “The Deserted Road,” have a natural sweetness; and his luxurious “Drifting,” which combines the methods of painting and poetry, is justly popular. “Sheridan’s Ride”—perhaps his most current piece—is a rather forced production, and has been overpraised.
His “Sheridan’s Ride” is among the most popular of our war-poems, but two lyrics, “Drifting” and “The Closing Scene” have a far higher poetic beauty. The last-named poem, with its subdued autumnal tone, has a grace and finish which remind us of the refined and delicate verse of Collins or of Gray.
A love of nature, patriotism, and chivalric respect for womanhood are the most obvious traits of Read’s Americanism. “The Brave at Home,” one of the lyrics interspersed throughout “The Wagoner of the Alleghanies,” inspired countless imitations, none of which approached the original in its combination of beauty and simplicity…. The lyric, “Drifting,” shows the work of both poet and artist, but in all the true essentials of lyric verse, “The Celestial Army” is easily first of all of Read’s poems.
