Celestia R. Colby essay on J. Rose Colby, circa 1860-1870
Short essay by Celestia Colby in which she recounts an incident in the life of her young daughter J. Rose Colby. The poem they reference is Locksley Hall by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Transcript: Little Rose was busily engaged to night watching the stars as they came out through the gathering gloom of the dusky twilight. There was old Orion wheeling slowly, majestically up the eastern sky with its attendant clusters, the seven sisters of the spring, or the Pleiades, and when she saw them for the first time since they began once more to visit us in the early evening, a fragment of a sweet old rhyme was running wild in her brain, which for an instant she could neither catch nor tame to wear its harness of words and do her bidding, neither could she recall the name of the fairy like group of stars which met her eye with the familiar look of an old-time friend. As usual she came to mama in her perplexity, and her query was "what is the name of those stars that are like a swarm [of] silver fire-flies stitched together in a braid." I could but smile at her [illegible] rendering of the poets rhyme, which in her mind will ever be wedded with pure cold radiance of the Pleiades. "I saw the Pleiades rising through the mellow shade, glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid."
Colby, Celestia R. (Celestia Rice), 1827-1900
Colby Family Papers, Dr. Jo Ann Rayfield Archives, Milner Library, Illinois State University (Normal, Illinois)
No copyright - United States