Fanny J. Crosby: An Autobiography by Fanny J. Crosby

Now and then during the early forties I contributed poems to the "Saturday Evening Post" and the "Clinton Signal," for which paper Mr. J. F. Chamberlain and Mr. F. J. Warner also wrote; and the compositor was continually confusing the initials of our names, so that it was sometimes difficult for our friends to tell just which of us wrote a certain piece. Mr. William Wye Smith wrote for the "Saturday Emporium," under the name of "Rusticus," and I answered him, using my own name. He afterward became a Congregational clergyman and the translator of the Bible into the old Scotch language; and he is still living in St. Catharines, Ontario. I also wrote occasionally for the "Fireman's Journal," a weekly supported by the volunteer companies of New York, in which I took an ardent interest. Most of my poems, in those years, were imaginative and sentimental; and one of them, which I now happen to remember, begins like this,

Let me die on the prairie, and o'er my rude grave 'Mid the soft winds of summer, the tall grass shall wave; I would breathe my last sigh, when the bright hues of even Are fading away in the blue arch of heaven.