Familiar Songs - Their Authors & Histories

Share page


	Convivial Songs.
	SPARKLING AND BRIGHT. Charles Fenno Hoffman, author of " Sparkling and Bright," was born in the city of New York in 1806. When he was eleven years old, he was one day down upon the Cort-landt Street pier watching a steamboat coming in. He sat with his feet swinging over the side, and one of his legs was crushed by the boat; yet he afterward became noted for grace in out-door sports. Mr. Hoffman was graduated at Columbia College, studied and practised law in New York, and established the Knickerbocker Magazine, which he edited for a while. He devoted himself to literature until about 1850, when he was attacked by a mental disorder and became an inmate of an insane-hospital. He died in Harrisburg, Penn., June 7, 1884. The music with which "Sparkling and Bright" has always been associated was composed for these words by James B. Taylor.