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I could not fall in love with a statue, as the poor girl in Procter's poem did with the Apollo Belvidere, though I think I could with a fine portrait: how could one fall in love with what had no eyes! Was it not Thorwaldsen who said that the three materials in which sculptors worked clay, plaster, and marble were like life, death, and immortality? I wonder what Sappho was like!
Meanwhile Harrison had come back from a recruiting mission; and a new brigade of Kentucky militia, twelve hundred strong, under Brigadier General Green Clay, was to follow in boats down the Auglaize and Maumee rivers. Procter's guns were already pounding the walls of Fort Meigs on the 5th of May when eight hundred troops of this fresh American force arrived within striking distance.
The enemy had won this extraordinary success with five hundred white troops and about the same number of Indians, led by Colonel Procter, whom Brock had placed in command of the fort at Amherstburg. Procter's name is infamous in the annals of the war. The worst traditions of Indian atrocity, uncontrolled and even encouraged, cluster about his memory.
Hunt's love for Procter was deep and tender, and in one of his notes to me he says, referring to the meeting my memory has been trying to describe, "I have reasons for liking our dear friend Procter's wine beyond what you saw when we dined together at his table the other day." Procter prefixed a memoir of the life and writings of Ben Jonson to the great dramatist's works printed by Moxon in 1838.
He had proclaimed martial law before leaving York. He had also heard details of the attack by Hull's raiders on the Moravian settlement, sixty miles up the Thames. He knew of the repulse of 300 United States troops in three attempts to cross the Canard River bridge for an attack on Amherstburg, and of their being driven into the open plains, with loss, by Procter's men.
Procter's tribute in verse to this "Queen and wonder of the enchanted world of sound" is one of his best lyrics, and never was singer more divinely complimented by poet. At the dinner I am describing he declared that she walked on the stage like an empress, "and when she sang," said he, "I held my breath."
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