Ye bards, ye prophets, ye sages,
Read to me, if ye can,
That which hath been the riddle of ages,
Read me the riddle of Man.
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married at Fishkill-on-the-Hudson to a young lady of an old Knickerbocker family, Miss Elizabeth De Windt.
If she did not come to him out of the Hudson, there can be no doubt that he courted her by the banks of the most beautiful river in North America.
Cranch had given up the clerical profession six months before this, and had adopted that of a landscape painter, for which he would seem to have studied with some artist in New York City, --unknown to fame, and long since forgotten.
He continued to sketch and paint, and write prose and verse on the Hudson until 1846, when he embarked with his wife on a sailing packet for Marseilles.
He had the good fortune to find a fellow-passenger in George William Curtis, and during the voyage of seven weeks, a life-long friendship grew up between these two highly gifted men.
The volume of poems which he published in 1844 is now exceedingly rare; yet many of the pieces belong to a high order of excellence.
In ease and grace of versification they resemble Longfellow, but in thought they are more like Emerson or Goethe.
Consider this opening from “The riddle” :
1905. E. P. DUtton and Co. Boston,.
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