Reading the work of ancestors

I recently found out that one of my ancestors, Norris Clarion Sprigg, was a poet. To my utter surprise, I found his large volume of work, Sprigs of Poetry, scanned in its entirety and available online. Originally published in 1907, it contains hundreds of poems about nature, people and humorous moments.

The only hard copy of this book that I am aware of is sitting on my great aunt's bedside table, on a snow-covered farm in rural Illinois. I've hundreds of poems to get through before I will truly have a sense of Norris C. Sprigg's body of work, but I am enjoying reading a bit of his light verse at the end of each day: it is comforting to connect to an ancestor who was busily writing odes to rock roses and towns without baths a hundred years before me. In his poem, "A Romance" it begins:

He'd nothing but his violin,
I'd nothing but my song;
But we were wed, when skies were blue
And summer days were long.

We sometimes sipped on dew-berries
And slept among the hay;
And oft the farmers' wives came out
At eve to hear us play.

The good old tunes, the dear old tunes,
We could not starve for long,
When my man had his violin,
And I my sweet love song.

It's good to meet an old relative on the great wide expanse of internet. And to read his lines of praise to sleeping in the hay and living well when the skies are blue? He was a man with my own heart.