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​Images courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System

Schenley Fountain

Mary Schenley

Although she owns so much of it, Mary Schenley did not choose to live in Pittsburgh. At 15, she eloped with a captain in the British army who was twice widowed and three times her age. She passed the remaining 62 years of her life in England and France, and when she died in 1903, she had not set foot in Pittsburgh for 40 years. But she remained loyal to the city of her birth, and in 1889, Schenley gave 400 acres to create Schenley Park as the eastern boundary of Oakland. Tradition holds that Mary Schenley’s father put up the Nationality Rooms in the Cathedral of Learning’s ground floor specifically to lure Mary back to Pittsburgh.
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Frick Fine Arts Building

Spanish War Memorial

Johnstown Flood



"A Voice from Death"
By Walt Whitman
​
A voice from Death, solemn and
strange, in all his sweep and
power,

With sudden, indescribable blow—towns
drown'd—humanity by thousands
slain

The vaunted work of thrift, goods,
dwellings, forge, street, iron bridge,

Dash'd pell-mell by the blow—yet
usher'd life continuing on.

(Amid the rest, amid the rushing, whirling,
wild debris,

An enceinte suff'ring woman saved—a baby safely
born!)

Although I come and unannounced, in
horror and in pang,

In pouring flood and fire, and wholesale
elemental crash, (this voice so solemn, strange,)

I too a minister of Deity.

[begin leaf 2 recto] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2
#
two leads

Yea, Death, we bow our faces, veil
our eyes to thee,

We mourn the old, the young untimely
drawn to thee,

The fair, the strong, the good, the capable,

The household wreck'd, the husband and
the wife, the engulf'd forger
in his forge,

The corpses in the whelming waters and
the mud,

The gather'd thousands in their funeral
mounds and thousands never found
or gather'd.

two leads

Then after burying, mourning the dead,

(Faithful to them, found or unfound, forgetting
not, bearing the past, here now musing,)

A day—a passing moment or an hour—we
bow ourselves—America itself bends low,

Silent, resign'd submmissive.

two leads

[begin leaf 3 recto] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


3

War, death, cataclysm like this, America,

Take deep to thy proud, prosperous heart.

two leads

E'en as I chant, lo! out of death, and
out of ooze and slime,

The blossoms rapidly blooming, sympathy,
help, love,

From west and east, from south and north
and over sea,

Its hot spurr'd hearts and hands humanity
to human ad aid moves on;

And from within a thought and lesson yet.

two leads

Thou ever-darting globe! thou earth and air!
Thou waters that encompass us!

Thou that in all the life and death of us,
in action or in sleep!

Thou laws invisible that permeate them
and all!

Thou that in all and over all, and through
and under all, incessant!

Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force
resistless, sleepless, calm,

[begin leaf 4 recto] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4
4

Holding humanity as in thy open hand,
as some ephemeral toy.

How ill to e'er forget thee!

two leads

For I too have forgotten,

(wrapt in these little potencies of progress,
politics, culture, wealth, inventions,
civilization.)

Have lost my recognition of your silent
ever-swaying power, ye mighty,
elemental throes,

In which and upon which we float,
and every one of us us is buoyed.

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