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Foster spent the last years of his life under wretched circumstances. His wife Jane had seen him no more since 1862. He introduced himself to one of his admirers even as the wreck of Stephen Collins Foster. Alcohol, bad diet, poverty and depressions have destroyed himself within a few years. Stephen Foster’s brother Morrison in Cleveland got a telegram of George Cooper with the message of his death on January 14th, 1864. Stephen had died in the New York Bellevue Hospital a day before, only three days after his admission to the hospital. He was buried in the family grave on the Allegheny Cemetery on January 21th.
A purse was part of his few personal belongings with a hardly considerable amount of money into civil war currency into it. One found subjects a little scrap of paper in it with a couple of words in his handwriting:
-- Idea for a song?
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Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea |
“Foster possessed a fund of plaintive melody which, had it coursed through more respected channels in art, might have given him a proud position as a composer. As it was, he can hardly be said to have been more then an amateur writer. We believe that he was only tolerably acquainted with the rules of composition, and in putting his ideas upon paper did so rather as a recreation, for he was engaged in some active mercantile calling until within a short period before his death.”
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