e won rank and honor without
fighting a battle, by virtue of the same qualities which enabled him
to do more than any one else towards founding a public observatory at
Cincinnati before any city in the East had one.

He was of Kentucky birth, and came a child to Ohio; but William H.
Lytle, dear to lovers of poetry as the author of the fine lyric, "Antony
and Cleopatra," was born in Cincinnati, of the old Scotch-Irish
stock, in 1826. He had everything pleasant in life and he enjoyed
his prosperity, but when the war came he met its call halfway. At
Chickamauga he fell, pierced by three bullets, in the thick of the
fight. As he dropped from his horse into the arms of friends, he
smiled his gratitude, and spent his last breath in urging them to save
themselves, and leave him to his fate. The poem which begins with the
well-known words,

"I am dying, Egypt, dying,"

will keep the name of Lytle in remembrance perhaps longer than all the
poems of Phoebe and Alice Cary shall live, such are the caprices of
fame; but the verse of these sisters is a part of American literature,
as they themselves are a part of its history. They were true poets, and
in their work a sense of

"The broad horizons of the West"

first made itself felt. They left the farm where they were born near
College Hill and came to live in Cincinnati after they began to be known
in literature, and later they went to dwell among the noises of New
York, where they died; but the country, the sweet Miami country,
remained a source of their inspiration, and now and again the reader
tastes its charm in their verse.

[Illustration: Harriet Beecher Stowe 284R]

They were undeniably Ohioan, while Pennsylvania may dispute our right
to the fame of Thomas Buchanan Read, though his most famous poem,
"Sheridan's Ride," was written and first recited in Cincinnati. We must
not more than remind ourselves that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe passed
part of her early life in that city, and is known to have gathered much
of the suggestion for "Uncle Tom's Cabin" among the Ohio scenes where
some of its most vivid events occur.

[Illustration: George Kennan 284L]

In the county of Huron a man of unquestionable claim to remembrance was
born. George Kennan, whose enviable privilege it was to let the light
in upon the misery of Siberian exile and to awaken the abhorrence of the
world for Russian tyranny, was a native of Norwalk, where he grew up a
telegraph operator. He worked at