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CHAPTER XVI |
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JEANIE WITH THE LIGHT BROWN HAIR
"I long for Jeanie and my heart bows low."
—Stephen Foster
I.
A
SIR GALAHAD attitude marked Stephen's relations with girls and young women in his early youth at Pittsburgh and during his Cincinnati years. As to the love sentiments in his songs he would have agreed that "the truest poetry is the most feigning."1 Upon his return to Pittsburgh early in 1850 he fell into his routine as a professional composer of music, and he shortly fell also into what was not routine for him. Soon he was dreaming, this time not feigning, of
. . . Jeanie with the light brown hair Borne like a vapor on the summer air.2
Jeanie was Jane Denny McDowell, daughter of the late Dr. Andrew N. McDowell/ the physician who had attended Charles Dickens when he was ill at Pittsburgh in 184a/ and great-granddaughter of Professor McDowell who was, in 1799, president of the College at Annapolis, Md."3 That Stephen had known her as one of the local group of girls before going to Cincinnati is probable, since Dunning, |
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