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NINETEENTH-CENTURY BALLADS 83
Often before a concert he would be found in floods of tears, sobbing out that he was convinced he was going to break down, and this eventually necessitated his retirement from public life.
"The Village Blacksmith" was composed about this time, the music being by W. H. Weiss, the bass singer, who flourished from 1820-67. It is a song that is still being sung to-day by Hayden Coffin and other popular singers.
The subject of "The Village Blacksmith" is said to have been Thaddeus W. Tyler, of Lynn, near Boston, U.S.A., who died quite recently at the age of seventy-six. Tyler often used to speak of his acquaintance with Longfellow, and declared that the latter showed him the poem in manuscript after it was completed.
Amongst other ballads that were popular in the first half of the nineteenth century may be mentioned "My Boyhood's Home" and "Under the Tree," by E. J. Loder ; "They mourn me dead in my father's halls " and the " Banks of the blue Moselle," by G. H. Rodwell ; "Away to the mountain's brow," "Come, dwell with me," and "The Soldier's Tear," by Alexander Lee ; " Phyllis is my only joy," by J. W. Hobbs, the tenor singer; "The Cuckoo," by Margaret Casson ; Franz Abt's "When the Swallows" and " Kathleen Aroon " ; and a setting of Thomas |
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