The Song of the Type

While correcting a local newspaper, I took a break from the endless news of Civil War pardons to switch to the Poet's Corner and peruse the offering of the day. The poem selected for the Winchester News of August 18, 1865 is an ode to the printing press as a means to redress wrongs (fitting for a newspaper still stinging over the recent Confederate defeat). The poem, in its entirety, runs thus:

Song of the Type

Click, click, click, 

List to the Song of the Type, 

Now breathing as soft and as light, 

As a sigh from the heart’s first emotion, 

Now swelling in grandeur and might 

As billows that roll on the ocean. 

Far reaching, eternal, its tones, 

From its clime where the ice-mountains shine 

Are borne over earth’s ample zones 

To the land of the myrtle and vine.

Click, click, click, 

List to the Song of the Type, 

To the nations down-trodden, oppressed, 

It speaks like the voice of a God, 

Of the wrongs of the people redressed; 

Of king-craft hurled down to the sod; 

Of the dawn of that on-coming day, 

When Right over Might shall prevail, 

When sceptre and crown shall decay, 

And the strength of the tyrant shall fail.

Click, click, click, 

List to the Song of the Type, 

For eastward a message it bears,

To the health that wanders in gloom; 

Glad tidings of peace it declares; 

It utters idolatry’s doom — 

’Tis echoed in anathemas divine, 

From mountain and valley and plain, 

’Tis the herald, triumphant, benign, 

Of humanity’s wide-spreading-reign.

Click, click, click, 

List to the Song of the Type, 

To him who is fated to roam, 

Alone on a far foreign strand, 

How sweet are its tidings of home,

Its words from his dear native land. 

The captives for liberty's sake, 

Repining in dungeon and chain, 

At its faintest heard accents awake, 

And gather new hope from its strain.

Click, click, click, 

List to the Song of the Type, 

To the student at midnight alone, 

Who pores over history's page,

 It breathes in a mystical tone, 

The wisdom of prophet and sage. 

It evokes from the centuries flown, 

The echoes of Deed and of Thought, 

Whatever of Science was known, 

Whatever Philosophy taught.

Click, click, click, 

List to the Song of the Type, 

The trumpet-toned voice of the press, 

With Justice and Mercy shall blend, 

Wherever there’s Wrong to redress, 

Wherever there’s Right to defend. 

The strong may contend for a name 

Which the future shall rest from their gripe; 

That future shall yield them no fame, 

Except through the Click of the Type.

Click, click, click, 

List to the Song of the Type, 

The arch of the Press is the bow 

Of promise to nation’s unborn. 

Its lustres no dimness shall know, 

O’er its beauty no cloud shall be borne, 

Serene and majestic its span 

Shall reach and encircle each shore, 

A symbol and token to man, 

The deluge of darkness is o’er.

As seems so common with these poetry reprintings, the poem is not credited in the paper. While a quick Google check turned up no other results, a search in other Virginia newspaper holdings turned up a shorter printing in Norfolk's Day Book of October 12, 1857. This version consists of four stanzas, slightly altered in some places, and without the excessive capitalization found in this version, with credit to Hon. N. T. Rosseter.

"The Hand Press," detail. From Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 32, 1865. Image courtesy the Library of Congress.

Who was N. T. Rosseter? A researcher found an N. T. Rosseter had sent fan mail to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow over the "Song of Hiawatha" in 1856 - it seems likely to be our Rosseter, though of course that is speculation. If it is the same person, he wrote to Longfellow from Middleburgh, New York and may have purchased a newspaper "Schoharie Republican" and renamed it "Democratic Republican" in 1854. He seems to have also been a postmaster and may have been involved with a hotel of his same last name. This search led us to one more clue - his first name may be Nathan. These gleanings are available thanks to the work of Joseph R. Brown Jr. and Roger Smith, working on an unpublished hand typed manuscript found at the Cobleskill Public Library for Schoharie.

Searching for a Nathan T. Rosseter, we find a bit of a youthful indiscretion of participating in an arson with two other students at West College (part of Williams College in Massachusetts) in 1829. While it seems Rosseter was only an accomplice, he  "was sent from college in disgrace.” He had apparently overcome this incident and was an assistant judge in 1845. He married Sarah Ingold Dodge in 1850 according to an issue of Rural Repository. Here is where the clear trail for Rosseter ends.

The poem, closer in form to the version reprinted in Winchester than the one in Norfolk, was reprinted (unattributed) several times in the late 1800s and early 1900s, notably in One Hundred Choice Selections and an even more abbreviated and rewritten version titled "Songs of Labor" in The Connecticut School Journal. An older poem "Song of the Types" appeared in the Anti-Slavery Bugle of 1855 seems similar. It was perhaps an inspiration for the version we see here (though it, too is uncredited in its publication).

While a likely pedigree and offspring of the poem can be traced, any record of Rosseter's more poetic work and how the poem came to be circulated appears lost. If you come across any more information on him or the poem mentioned here, drop me a note!

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