A SPIRIT of pleasure and youth's golden gleam!? It takes a magic line such as this of Wordsworth to suggest the fascination of the period from 1846 to 1850 which Stephen Collins Foster, aged twenty to twenty-three, spent in Cincinnati. The happiest years of his life, he called them, as his daughter has testified. He had the very heaven of being young, of working on his own in a large and stimulating city, and of composing melodies rendered in polite parlors and one lusty song, "Oh! Susanna," roared by the Forty-Niners on their covered-wagon journeys to California and echoed around the world.
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