508 RICHMOND COUNTY. 



rary world has long been satisfied that there was not the least 

 foundation for this charge, and we would not now allude to it 

 had we not met with an incorrect statement concerning these 

 lines in Sir Charles Lyell's Second Visit to the United States. 

 Part 2, page 102, Sir Charles says, " ' My life is like the summer 

 rose' are usually supposed to have derived their tone of touch- 

 ing melancholy from his grief at the sudden death of a brother, 

 and, soon after, of a mother, who never recovered the shock of 

 her son's death." To prove that this statement is incorrect, 

 we will avail ourselves of Mr. Wilde's own language, in a 

 letter to a friend. " The lines in question, you will perceive, 

 were originally intended as part of a longer poem. My bro- 

 ther, the late James Wilde, was an officer of the United States 

 army, and held a subaltern rank in the expedition of Colonel 

 John Williams against the Seminole Indians of Florida, which 

 first broke up their towns and stopped their atrocities. When 

 James returned, he amused my mother, then alive, my sisters, 

 and myself, with descriptions of the orange groves and transpa- 

 rent lakes, the beauty of the St. John's river, and of the woods 

 and swamps of Florida — a kind of fairy land of which we 

 then knew little, except from Bartram's ecstasies — interspersed 

 with anecdotes of his campaign and companions, as he had 

 some taste himself. I used to laugh, and tell him I'd immor- 

 tahze his exploits in an epic. Some stnnzas were accordingly 

 written for the amusement of the family at the next meeting. 

 That, alas ! was destined never to take place. He was killed 

 in a duel. His violent and melancholy death put an end to 

 my poem, the third stanza of the first fragment, which alluded 

 to his fate, being all that was written afterward." Again, Sir 

 Charles says, " As there had been so much controversy about 

 this short poem, we asked Mr. Wilde to relate to us its true 

 history, which is curious. He had been one of a party at 

 Savannah, when the question was raised whether a certain 

 professor of the University of Georgia understood Greek ; on 

 which one of his companions undertook to translate Mr. 

 Wilde's verses, called ' The Complaint of the Captive,' into 

 Greek prose, so arranged as to appear like verse, and then see 

 if he could pass it oft' upon the professor as a fragment of 

 Alcseus. The trick succeeded, although the professor said that 



