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Lovewell's Fight, II
First printed in Farmer and Moore's Collections, Historical and Miscellaneous; and Monthly Literary Journal, Concord, New Hampshire, March, 1824, IIJ, 94-97, with the note, "For the Monthly Literary Journal." I reprint it exactly, letter for letter and point for point, merely adding numbers for the stanzas. The poem was anonymous, but was probably written by the Rev. Thomas Cogswell Upham (1799-1872), then the minister of Rochester, New Hampshire, afterwards Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Bowdoin College (1825-1867). I have a text differing from the original in a few minute points of expression which was furnished by Mrs. F. H. Eckstorm. She states that the ballad was taught her by her father (born in 1838) when she was a child, and that he learned it from his father.
An acknowledged poem of Upham's on Lovewell's Fight (beginning "Ah! where are the soldiers that fought here of yore?") is printed by Farmer and Moore in their Collections, I, 35-36 (1822); by Drake in his edition of Church, 1829, Appendix, pp. 335-336; by Bouton in his edition of Symmes, 1861, pp. 47-48; by Kidder, The Expeditions 0/ Capt. John Lovewell, 1865, pp. 122-123 (reprint, 1909, pp. 101-102); by Nason, History of the Town of Dunstable, 1877, pp. 54-55; and in the Cincinnati edition of Penhallow (1859), p. 136.
Still another copy of verses, "The Mournfull Elegy of Mr. Jona. Frye, 1725," was printed for the first time (as communicated by T. C. Frye, of Andover, Massachusetts) in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 1861, XV, 91, with the remark: "These lines, traditions say, were written when the news of his death reached Andover, by a young girl to whom he had engaged himself against the wishes of his parents; their objections were want of property and education. Her name is lost." But Samuel L. Knapp, who had a manuscript copy, and who an- |
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