I do not think it at all the least of her honors that Franklin County should be the birthplace of the horse tamer John S. Rarey, for whose celebrity the world was once not too large. He imagined a gentle art of managing horses by study of their nature and character, and in Europe, as well as America, he showed how he could subdue the fiercest of them to his will, through his patient kindness. In England the ferocious racing colt Cruiser yielded to Rarey, and everywhere the most vicious animals felt his magic. He was the author of a “Treatise on Horse Taming” which had a great vogue in various languages, and he achieved a reputation which was by no means mere notoriety.
Coates Kinney of Xenia was not born in Greene County, or even in Ohio; but he came to our state from New York when a boy, he has lived here ever since, and has been shaped by its life. His poem of “Rain on the Roof” is a household word, and it is the poem which will first come into the reader’s mind at the mention of his name. But his greatest poem is “Optim and Pessim,” which is one of the subtlest and strongest passages of human thought concerning the mystery of the universe; and his next greatest is his “Ode for the Ohio Centennial,” delivered at Columbus in 1888. It merits a place with the best that have celebrated, like Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode,” the achievements of the people.
In Greene County began the long journalistic life of William D. Gallagher, who was born in Philadelphia in 1808, but came while a child to Southern Ohio, and grew up in the impassioned love of that beautiful country. There was not much besides its beauty to endear it to him, for his life was a long struggle there with adverse conditions. But he never lost heart or hope; he failed cheerfully in one literary enterprise after another, and turned from literature to politics until he found the means and the chance to fail again in the field where his heart was always. In Xenia, in Cincinnati, in Columbus, in Louisville, he lived, now here, now there, as his hopes and enterprises called him, and ended at last on a little farm in Kentucky. His poetic vein was genuine; it was sometimes overworked, but at least one poem of entire loveliness was minted from it; and there are few American poems which impart a truer and tenderer feeling for nature than Gallaghers “August,” beginning--