Did You Know...

“A line poetic...”

On March 7, 1851, just a few months before his death at age 61, Justice Levi Woodbury wrote an eight-line poem for a “Miss R. D. Smith.” It was not uncommon for Justices to sign or write a note when offered an autograph book and are said to have sometimes passed them down the Bench. In the first stanza, Woodbury admits that he is not “poet born,” yet it was also not his first venture into verse. This is one of over a dozen poems known to have been penned by Woodbury—the earliest of which he wrote at just 15 years old. Woodbury may also have been a reader of poetry because “with thoughts that breathe & words that burn” directly references the same famous line by 18th-century poet Thomas Gray.