The Argosy, Vol. 73

This issue of The Argosy from March 1907 contains two pieces. "The Shepherd," a narrative poem by Herbert Morrah, tells of a rural shepherd persuaded by the City to abandon his mountain home and flock, seeking glory and ambition in urban life. He departs despite a maiden's call, finds only hollow pleasures and contempt among city dwellers, eventually descends to namelessness, and returns briefly to scorn the rustic people left behind. The poem's moral critiques both the shepherd's folly and the poet's similar inability to escape the City's walls.

The second piece, "Giuseppe Verdi: An Anecdotic Record," provides biographical details of the composer's life from his humble birth in 1813 in Roncole (son of an innkeeper) through his early struggles as a church organist earning minimal wages, his education in Busseto under patronage of musical amateur Antonio Barezzi, his marriage to Barezzi's daughter in 1835, and personal tragedies including the deaths of his two children and wife in 1840. The account details his failed Conservatoire application and his breakthrough with the opera Nabuco in 1842, followed by I Lombardi (1843) and Ernani (1844).