THE
POEMS
OF
HENRY TIMROD

EDITED, WITH A SKETCH OF THE POET'S LIFE,
BY
PAUL H. HAYNE

NEW REVISED EDITION

NEW YORK:
E. J. HALE & SON, PUBLISHERS, MURRAY STREET

Entered according to act of Congress in the year 1872, by
E. J. HALE & SON,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

LANGE, LITTLE & HILLMAN,
PRINTERS, ELECTROTYPERS AND STEREOTYPERS,
108 TO 114 WOOSTER STREET, N. Y.

TO THE
POET'S WIFE AND SISTER, *
AND TO HIS EARNEST FRIENDS, THE
HON. GEORGE S BRYAN,
OF CHARLESTON S.C.,
AND
DOCTOR J. DICKSON BRUNS,
OF NEW ORLEANS,
THIS VOLUME IS
Dedicated.

* This sister died soon after the "Dedication" was penned. The life-long affection between the Poet and herself was of the most tender, touching, and beautiful description. They sympathized in heart, soul, and intellect. Their names must always be associated in the memory of gentle and appreciative spirits.

CONTENTS

• Memoir of Henry Timrod. . . 7
• Dedication. . . 71
• Katie. . . 73
• Carolina. . . 80
• A Cry to Arms. . . 83
• Serenade. . . 85
• Why Silent? . . . 86
• Two Portraits. . . 87
• Charleston. . . 97
• Ripley. . . 99
• Ethnogenesis. . . 100
• Christmas. . . 104
• La Belle Juive. . . 107
• An Exotic. . . 109
• The Rosebuds. . . 111
• A Mother's Wail. . . 112
• Our Willie. . . 114
• Carmen Triumphale. . . 118
• Address at the Opening of Richmond Theatre. . . 121
• The Cotton Boll. . . 125
• Spring. . . 131
• The Unknown Dead. . . 134
• The Two Armies. . . 136
• A Vision of Poesy. . . 137
• The Past. . . 162
• Præceptor Amat. . . 163
• Dreams. . . 166

  ---

  Page vi

• The Problem. . . 168
• The Arctic Voyager. . . 172
• A Year's Courtship. . . 173
• Dramatic Fragment. . . 176
• The Summer Bower. . . 178
• A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night. . . 180
• Flower Life. . . 184
• Youth and Manhood. . . 186
• A Summer Shower. . . 189
• Baby's Age. . . 190
• Hark to the Shouting Wind. . . 191
• The Messenger Rose. . . 192
• Too Long, O Spirit of Storm!. . . 193
• The Lily Confidante. . . 194
• On Pressing Some Flowers. . . 196
• A Common Thought. . . 197
• Sonnets. . . 197 to 203
• 1866 - Addressed to the Old Year. . . 204
• Ode, Sung at the Decoration of Graves of Confederate Dead. . . 209
• Hymn, Sung at a Sacred Concert. . . 210
• The Stream is Flowing from the West. . . 211
• Stanzas, Written in Illustration of a Tableau Vivant. . . 212
• Retirement. . . 213
• Vox et Preterea Nihil. . . 215
• Hymn, Sung at an Anniversary of an Orphan Asylum. . . 216
• To a Captive Owl. . . 217
• Love's Logic. . . 218
• Second Love. . . 220
• Hymn, Sung at the Consecration of Magnolia Cemetery. . . 221
• Lines to R.L. . . . 221
• Madeline. . . 223
• To Whom? . . . 227
• To Thee . . . 228
• Storm and Calm. . . 229
• Sonnets. . . 230 to 232

MEMOIR OF HENRY TIMROD

        Frequently, in his critical essays, RICHARD HENRY STODDARD has referred to TIMROD, as in his opinion the ablest poet the South had yet produced - a verdict fully sustained by some other (Northern) writers of high position, to whose notice the poems had been brought.

        These facts may prove, in some sort, an introduction to the present volume, so far as the Northern public is concerned. They may win for it a candid examination, all that is necessary, doubtless, for its success.

        Meanwhile, I purpose to give a sketch of TIMROD'S life, which, though comparatively brief, and to an exceptional degree uneventful, is still of interest, as throwing much light upon the character of his verses, and the development of his genius.

        HENRY TIMROD was born in Charleston, S.C., on the 8th of December, 1829. He was the son of WILLIAM H. TIMROD, whose father (HENRY TIMROD), a native of Germany, had married Miss GRAHAM, a gifted and highly educated lady of the north of Ireland, though of Scotch descent, and in good, if not affluent, circumstances. Mr. TIMROD had been for a considerable time a resident in this country, and was, it seems, a widower, when Miss GRAHAM came to Carolina. Sometime in 1792, their only son, WILLIAM, was born on a Plantation not far from Charleston.

        Upon the death of his father, which occurred unfortunately while the lad was quite young, his mother married again; a step by which the family means, already reduced by the exigencies of a revolutionary time, were still further squandered.

        Nevertheless, an effort was made by the mother to educate her son for the Bar. It was frustrated in a manner at once ludicrous and provoking. At the age of eleven, WILLIAM, then at school, became possessed of an idea - a brilliant, fascinating conception - which he must seize the first opportunity of practically testing. To the boy's fancy the most enviable of mortals appeared to be, not a king or a conquering soldier, but a bookbinder!

        Reasoning from his narrow premises, he concluded that this lucky craftsman must, by the necessities of his position, have access to innumerable volumes, and to stores of untold learning. In order to realize this personally, and to live thenceforth in a beatified atmosphere of Russia leather, he ran away from school, and having found his Phoenix - a complacent bookbinder - placed himself deliberately under his tuition. Of course the intelligent lad must soon have perceived how his dreams of the trade and its æsthetic facilities had deceived him; but whether actuated by self-will,

or some better motive not revealed to others, he resisted both his mother's entreaties and the remonstrances of friends, refusing utterly to return to his orthodox studies.

        Thus, by his own erratic will, the father of the poet became a mechanic - a skilled mechanic, we have been told - and rather proud than otherwise, like the true man he was, of his useful and honest craft. *

        In the course of time, WILLIAM TIMROD, self-educated, but full of information, especially in English belles lettres, attracted the attention of his fellow-citizens by his brilliant talents. The wise and the gifted were happy to associate with him; and by the simple mastery of genius, he gained no trifling influence among the highest intellectual and social circles of a city noted at that period for aristocratic exclusiveness. Lawyers, politicians, editors, littérateurs, and gentlemen of scholarly ease and culture, would gather about his place of work, chiefly for the delight of listening to his unpremeditated and eloquent conversation. He seems indeed to have been - longo intervallo - a provincial Coleridge, holding his little audiences spell-bound by the mingled audacity and originality of his remarks.

        Nor were his gifts exclusively conversational. On the contrary, that he possessed the special endowments of a poet, and of a poet of no mean order, some of the songs and sonnets he has left us clearly demonstrate.

* When the young aspirant after knowledge became bound to his master, he found that he had neither much time given him in the day to read, nor light at night! - "I have heard him declare," says one of his daughters, "that he used, when the moon was clear, or at its full, to climb on the leads of the house, and there, by the lunar rays, to read into the small hours of the night: Shakspeare was, at that time, his favorite companion."

        Of these, an Ode "TO TIME," * an apostrophe to "THE MOCKING BIRD," and a Sonnet called "Autumnal Day in Carolina," are the most finished and striking. I will quote them here.

TO TIME - THE OLD TRAVELLER.

I.

II.

        * These four stanzas, "TO TIME," formed a portion, originally, of a much longer poem. Oddly enough, they occur in a very unambitious production, viz., a newspaper "Carrier's Address." Apropos of the verses, Judge Bryan, in a private letter to me, observes, "As one proof of the excellence of the ode, "To Time," let me say here what it would have delighted me to have said to the author, that on my reciting this poem to Washington Irving, he exclaimed with fervor, that 'Tom Moore had written no finer lyric.' "

III.

IV.

THE MOCKING BIRD.

                        "Nor did lack
                        Sweet music to the magic of the scene:
                        The little crimson-breasted Nonpareil
                        Was there, his tiny feet scarce bending down
                        The silken tendril that he lighted on
                        To pour his love-notes - and in russet coat,
                        Most homely, like true genius bursting forth
                        In spite of adverse fortune - a full choir
                        Within himself - the merry Mock Bird sate,
                        Filling the air with melody - and at times,
                        In the rapt fervor of his sweetest song,

                        His quivering form would spring into the sky,
                        In spiral circles, as if he would catch
                        New powers from kindred warblers in the clouds,
                        Who would bend down to greet him!"

AUTUMNAL DAY IN CAROLINA. A SONNET.

                        "Sleeps the soft South, nursing its delicate breath
                        To fan the first buds of the early spring,
                        And summer sighing, mourns his faded wreath,
                        Its many-colored glories withering
                        Beneath the kisses of the new-waked North,
                        Who yet in storms approaches not - but smiles
                        On the departing season, and breathes forth
                        A fragrance, as of summer - till at whiles,
                        All that is sweetest in the varying year,
                        Seems softly blent in one delicious hour,
                        Waking dim visions of some former sphere,
                        Where sorrows - such as earth owns - had no power
                        To veil the changeless lustre of the skies,
                        And mind and matter formed one Paradise!"

        Not equal in poetical merit to the foregoing, but even more interesting because of their subject, are the lines which follow. They are mournfully prophetic:

TO HARRY.

                        "Harry, my little blue-eyed boy,
                        I love to hear thee playing near;
                        There's music in thy shouts of joy
                        To a fond father's ear.

                        "I love to see the lines of mirth
                        Mantle thy cheek and forehead fair,
                        As if all pleasures of the earth
                        Had met to revel there;

                        "For gazing on thee, do I sigh
                        That these most happy hours will flee,
                        And thy full share of misery
                        Must fall in life on thee!

                        "There is no lasting grief below,
                        My Harry! that flows not from guilt;
                        Thou can'st not read my meaning now -
                        In after times thou wilt.

                        "Thou'lt read it when the churchyard clay
                        Shall lie upon thy father's breast,
                        And he, though dead, will point the way
                        Thou shalt be always blest.

                        "They'll tell thee this terrestrial ball,
                        To man for his enjoyment given,
                        Is but a state of sinful thrall
                        To keep the soul from heaven.

                        "My boy! the verdure-crownéd hills,
                        The vales where flowers innumerous blow,
                        The music of ten thousand rills
                        Will tell thee, 'tis not so.

                        "God is no tyrant who would spread
                        Unnumbered dainties to the eyes,
                        Yet teach the hungering child to dread
                        That touching them he dies!

                        "No! all can do his creatures good,
                        He scatters round with hand profuse -
                        The only precept understood,
                        'Enjoy, but not abuse!' "

        In the Nullification controversy of 1832-3, when all South Carolina was convulsed as with the throes of a political and moral earthquake, when, in Charleston especially, a bitterness of party feeling prevailed, which threatened at any moment to precipitate revolution and bloodshed, WILLIAM TIMROD espoused the cause of the Union with all the ardor and enthusiasm of his poet soul.

        One morning, while at work in his employer's store, the "divine afflatus" came suddenly upon him, and he composed the following fiery song, which, doubtless, has the true lyric ring, although, as might have been anticipated under the circumstances, it does grave injustice to the motives and character of the leaders of Nullification. In the midst of composing these verses, he became, we are told, "so transported with the passion of his work," that rushing from his own small room in the rear, he fairly shouted out the lines in his employer's ears! Greatly astonished was that gentleman, for previous to this outburst Mr. Timrod's manner towards him had been marked by a studied reserve; nor was it the poet's habit to declaim his rhymes, even among his intimates.

SONS OF THE UNION!

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

        The intense bitterness of tone displayed in this lyric, will be understood and partially excused by those who reflect that it was, in truth, a campaign production, written during the heat and in the midst of the recriminations of the most savage political contest this country had known previous to the year 1860.

        But William Timrod was not a mere writer of miscellaneous verses. I learn from the best authority that he composed a Drama in Five Acts, which he regarded, as par excellence, the literary labor of his life! By some strange fatality the manuscript of this play was lost - a misfortune which his son continually and bitterly lamented.

        His patriotism and popularity with the chiefs of his own party procured, after a time, for William Timrod an honorable position in the Charleston Custom House. How long he retained this office I have had no means of ascertaining.

        In 1835 he was elected to the command of the German Fusileers, an ancient and distinguished volunteer corps of Charleston, composed of Germans and men of German descent, and marched with them to garrison the town of St. Augustine, in Florida, against the attacks of the Seminole Indians. Exposure, hardship, and protracted labor, brought on a disease of which, about two years after his return to Charleston, he died.

        Thus perished in his prime a man of remarkable mental vigor and versatility. What be might have done under fairer auspices, it would be useless to inquire. His name

henceforth must live chiefly in the reputation of his son, his "blue-eyed Harry," of whom he wrote so feelingly, and with such prescient insight.

        The latter obtained his primary education at one of the best schools in Charleston. There I first made his acquaintance - an acquaintance which similarity of tastes, and an equality of age, soon ripened into friendship. My seat in the school-room being next to his, I well remember the exultation with which he showed me, one morning, his earliest consecutive attempt at verse-making.

        It was a ballad of stirring adventures, and sanguinary catastrophe! But I thought it perfect - wonderful - and so, naturally, did he. Our "down East" schoolmaster, however, (all whose duties except those connected with penal inflictions, were left to his ushers, for our Principal united the morals of Pecksniff with the learning of Squeers), could boast of no turn for sentiment, and having remarked us hobnobbing, meanly assaulted us in the rear, effectually quenching for the time all æsthetic enthusiasm.

        An early teacher of Timrod, who really knew and appreciated his character and mind, describes him when a boy, as "modest and diffident, with a nervous utterance, but with melody ever in his heart and on his lips. Though always slow of speech, he was yet, like Burns, quick to learn. The chariot wheels might jar in the gate through which he tried to drive his winged steeds, but the horses were of celestial temper, and the car of purest gold." Shy, but neither melancholy nor morose, he was passionate, impulsive, eagerly ambitious, with a thirst for knowledge hard to satiate. But too close a devotion to books did not destroy the natural lightness and simplicity of youth. He mingled freely with his comrades, all of whom respected, while some dearly loved him. At that time of life he was physically active and

vigorous, and delighted in every sort of rough out-door sport; in leaping, running, wrestling, swimming, and even in fighting. More than once I have known him to engage in a desperate affaire d'honneur, the issue of which was decided by a primitive species of science that would have disgusted the orthodox "ring."

        "How unspeakably," exclaims one of his associates, "Timrod rejoiced in the weekly holiday, with its long rambles through field and wood! And this taste strengthened with his growth. 'The sweet security of streets,' that Elia loved, had no charm for him.

        "Born in a city, pent up in its dusty avenues, he longed for the untrammeled freedom of the country. He doted upon its waving fields, its deep blue skies, and the glory of the changing seasons. These formed his special delight, because in them he instinctively recognized his best teachers. Face to face with Nature he had no fears, no misgivings; always a beneficent mother, she 'nursed him with the milk of a better time,' and through all his years he leaned on her breast with the loving trustfulness of a little child."

        When about sixteen or seventeen, Timrod was prepared to enter college. By the advice, and under the influence of friends, he matriculated at the University of Georgia. There, his vivid intelligence and scholarly ardor soon began to display themselves.

        He sought to enlarge his culture and refine his taste by habitual commerce with the classics. By the horror and gloom of the Æschlylean drama he appears to have been revolted; but "sad Electra's poet" charmed him; he revelled in the elegant art of Virgil; and of the graces of Horace and Catullus he never wearied.

        From the fountain of English letters he quaffed unceasingly. Nevertheless, his reading was more exact than varied.

His unerring critical tact rejected the false and meretricious; but for authors of his deliberate choice, his affection daily increased.

        There, too, at the University, his poetical gifts commenced to "burgeon" luxuriantly. "A large part," said he, laughing, "of my leisure at college, was occupied in the composition of love verses, frantic or tender. Every pretty girl's face I met acted upon me like an inspiration! I fancied myself a sublimated Turk (when these faces were reproduced in day-dreams) though walking an ideal, and therefore innocent, Harem of young Beauties." Some of the cleverest of these love-songs were published in "The Charleston Evening News," over a fictitious signature. They became, locally, quite popular, and in one instance, to the author's intense delight, his verses were set to music.

        Unluckily, the young poet's college career was brought to a sudden close, in part by temporary ill health, and yet more perhaps, by the "res augusta domi." Forced thus to leave his alma mater, his brow unadorned by academic honors - he left her, at all events, possessed of valuable stores of learning, and with an intellect unusually well drilled, and disciplined.

        And now the battle of existence opened in grim earnest; for him an unending struggle with evil fates; a conflict in which, overcome again and again, thrown to earth as fast as he struggled up therefrom, he found but few kindly hands to help him; and yet came off more than conqueror, through untold resources of his liberal nature.

        Timrod's first move upon returning to his native city, was to enter, as a student, the office of that distinguished lawyer, James L. Petigru, Esq. Often in those days, he frequented the rooms of the "Charleston Mechanic's Library Association," where at irregular intervals an informal debating club of young men was in the habit of assembling.

        Timrod was fond of argument, but as an extemporaneous speaker, he had not, as already hinted, inherited his father's facility of language and illustration. Unless excited upon some theme of special moment, he hesitated, stammered, and was continually at a loss for words to embody his ideas; although the ideas themselves were never commonplace or trivial.

        On the other hand, he was an admirable reader, even if his style did sometimes verge upon the theatrical.

        I can see him now as he appeared in his early manhood, repeating in a deep, musical bass voice, his favorite "ode" on "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood." Short of stature, but broad-chested, and compactly formed, with his superb head well set set upon shoulders, erect, and thrown back in haughty grace - his gray eyes flashing, and his swarthy face one glow of intense emotion - it was impossible to listen to him without catching some spark of his fiery enthusiasm.

        In 1848-9, having assumed the nom de plume of "AGLÄUS," * he commenced a series of contributions to the " The Southern Literary Messenger," then edited by that kindly and accomplished scholar, John R. Thompson, Esq. His genius was gradually maturing, and his art-culture with it!

        Let any one who can, examine the back numbers of "The Messenger," from 1849 to the year 1853, containing as they do, the best of our author's earlier poems, and I think it will be acknowledged, that despite some superficial marks of imitation, the verses display both individuality and power. One piece especially, entitled "The Past," was so full of a subdued thoughtfulness and beauty, that after having been republished by scores of periodicals, it came under the notice

* The name of a minor pastoral poet of Greece.

of a distinguished Northern gentleman, himself an author who, corresponding with a friend in Charleston, expressed his hearty admiration of the lines, making inquiry at the same time in reference to the poet, and his circumstances. The letter was shown to Timrod, and its encouraging effect was greater and more permanent, than could be understood by any person not gifted in some degree with the susceptibility of genius.

        Every poet, in the morning of his career among the masters of song that have preceded him, is apt to select some special object of his imaginative and artistic worship. In those days, Timrod looked up to Wordsworth as his poetical guide and exemplar. With a constant and loving earnestness, he studied his works, caught their spirit of simplicity and truth, and thus laid the foundation of a style, which, however modified by after-studies and experience, was remarkable to the last for its pure Saxon vigor, its terseness, lucidity, and unpretending grace.

        Finding the law distasteful, * Timrod threw aside his

        * Alluding to this period, Judge Bryan says (in a private communication), "Timrod was too wholly a poet to keep company long with so relentless, rugged, and exacting a mistress as the law! As a curious illustration of the abstraction and reverie which so often absorbed the poet, he told me that Mr. Petigru sent him on one occasion to take a message to a certain Factor on the Bay. But as ill-luck would have it, when he had gone half way he found he had forgotten, if indeed he ever really knew, the message entrusted to his care. What was to be done? He could only return, and, with as bold a face as possible, acknowledged his misfortune

        "On his doing so, Mr. Petigru saluted him, very much excited, in his highest squeaking voice, 'Why Harry, you are a fool!' And, added our poet friend to me, 'I would have been a fool to Mr. Petigru to the end of my days, even had I revealed in after-life the genius of a Milton or a Shakspeare!' "

Chitty and Blackstone, and determined to renew his classical studies, so as to make himself a competent as a College Professor or a Tutor in families. This he conscientiously did, and in due time, no Professorship opening to him, he accepted the post of teacher of children in the household of a Carolina planter, with whom he remained for several consecutive seasons.

        Henceforth, for a decade at least, the labors of a tutor were the sole means upon which be relied for subsistence. He went from household to household faithfully instructing the youths placed under him; longing often, no doubt, and passionately longing, for a different field of toil or action; yet not ungrateful for the leisure hours allowed him, in which he could cultivate his own mind, and exercise his imagination in writing.

        In this narrow round of simple duties and pleasures, his youth was spent. At times there came to him from the outer world sounds which stirred his deeper heart, and quickened his pulse into momentary unison with that feverish life that he felt was burning beyond him. But he repressed the desire which even the most languid must feel at intervals, to be of the world, doers as well as thinkers, and travelled along life's common way, conscious only of his own pure aims; and, perhaps, somewhat dimly conscious as yet of his extraordinary powers.

        Whenever in spring or winter the holiday season came round, Timrod, forgetting his cares, would joyfully rush down to Charleston to be welcomed by a small coterie of friends with demonstrative cordiality.

        Among these was William Gilmore Simms, who delighted

to gather round him the younger literary men of his acquaintance, and to discuss with them the thousand and one topics connected with art and letters. Many and jovial were the "little suppers" of which we partook at his pleasant town residence, none of the guests, perhaps, enjoying themselves as vividly as Timrod, whose excitable temperament, and keenly social proclivities, made his whole heart expand in the companionship of those he loved and trusted.

        It was at one of these petits soupers that the idea originated of starting a Monthly Magazine in Charleston, which might serve as an exponent of Southern talent and culture. The idea speedily assumed a definite form. An enterprising, intelligent, and popular bookseller then doing business in the city, Mr. John Russell, was induced to take the practical management of the work, which, in honor of its founder, was called "Russell's Magazine." The editorship devolved upon the present writer, supported by a small corps of clever, but by no means very regular collaborateurs.

        On the first day of April (ominous coincidence!), the initial number of "Russell's" appeared. It was neatly printed in the style of "Blackwood," and the general impression, typographical and intellectual, made by it, was certainly favorable. In the long run, however, a want of capital proved in this case, as it must prove in all similar cases, fatal! "Eleemosynary literature," as Mr. Simms used to call it, can never be permanently maintained; nor, were that possible, would it in all likelihood be worth maintaining. Nevertheless, we struggled on with the work for years; nor until the completion of the fourth volume, did we confess ourselves beaten, and retire with our defunct "Maga" from the public view. The lost means and labor expended on this Monthly I have always looked upon us counterbalanced by the facilities for publication it afforded to our gifted local

authors; especially to Timrod, some of whose most charming and characteristic poems were composed for its pages.

        Such, for instance, was "The Arctic Voyager," in which we detect for the first time in our author's art, the influence of Tennyson, not superseding, but harmoniously blending with the earlier influence of Wordsworth. Such also, were his "Præceptor Amat," and "The Rhapsody of a Southern Winter's Night." Among the briefer lyrics carelessly thrown off by him at this period, we find in "Russell's" the fragment of a song faithfully reflecting one of those sombre moods, which, owing to circumstances rather than temperament, were, alas! too frequent with him. It is in a loose, reckless measure, rhythmically unlike any other production of the writer, and since this volume does not include it, we will quote the lines. They have a psychological, if not poetical, significance:

                        "Is it gone forever, my gay spring time?
                        Shall I never be as I was then -
                        And this dead heart which once bent so wildly,
                        Who shall wake it - can it wake again?

                        "From the sea where joy lies buried, shall not
                        Something like its shadow flutter up?
                        The bright wine of life, I quaffed so madly,
                        Hath it left no sweetness in the cup?

                        "Yet it is not that my youth has perished -
                        If I count by years I am not old;
                        Of that youth I stripped the buds too early,
                        And its leafless stem is all I hold.

                        "Oh! doth no new Autumn yet await me?
                        Thus I question Fate, but Fate is mute.
                        Is it Autumn? where is Autumn's foliage,
                        And its golden store of luscious fruit?"

        In the same periodical we find a few specimens of Timrod's powers as a prose essayist and critic. Discussing that venerable question, "What is Poetry?" he shows a strong, clear judgment, and a thorough appreciation of his subject in all its phases.

        "As we recall," he says, "the various attempts to describe, in a single definition, those operations of the human mind upon itself and the world without, which, incarnated in language, we term poetry, we are reminded of a childish search, actually commenced by ourselves, after the pot of gold which is said to be buried at the foot of the rainbows."

        Elsewhere he remarks:

        "Poetry does not deal in pure abstractions. However abstract be his thought, the poet is compelled, by his passion-fused imagination, to give it life, form, or color.

        "Hence the necessity of employing the sensuous or concrete words of the language, and hence the exclusion of long words, which in English are nearly all purely and austerely abstract, from the poetic vocabulary. Whenever a poet drags a number of these words into his verse, we say that he is prosaic; meaning by this, not that he has written prose, nor that he is simply deficient in spirit and vivacity; but that he has not used the legitimate language of poetry; he has written something which is only distinguished from the ordinary dead-level of unimpassioned prose by the feet upon which it crawls."

        And again: "The ground of the poetic character is a more than ordinary sensibility. From this characteristic of the poet results what we regard as an essential characteristic of poetry, namely, the medium of strong emotion through which poetry looks at its objects, and in which, to borrow a chemical metaphor of Arthur Hallam, 'it holds them all fused.' Hence, again, is derived a third peculiarity in the

language of poetry, which, with a difference in the degree, not the kind, of its force - arising from an imagination more than usually vivid - is the language natural to men in a state of excitement, is sensuous, picturesque, and impassioned!"

        From these extracts, and the extracts about to follow, an imperfect glimpse may be obtained of the writer's poetic creed.

        Timrod, as was natural with a disciple of Wordsworth, enthusiastically admired the Sonnet. He defends it against the assaults of a large body of depreciators with admirable skill and effect.

        "The Sonnet," he begins, "has been called artificial. It is artificial, but only as all forms of verse are artificial. There are persons who imagine poetry to be the result of a sort of mystical inspiration, scarcely to be subjected to the bounds of time or space! Others, regarding it as the outgushing of a present emotion, cannot conceive how the poet, carried on by the 'divine afflatus,' should always contrive to rein in his Pegasus at a certain goal. All this is ridiculous!

        "If the poet have his hour of inspiration (though we are so sick of the cant of which this word has been the fruitful source, that we dislike to use it), it is not during the act of composition.

        "A distinction must be made between the moment when the great thought first breaks upon the mind,

                        'Leaving in the brain
                        A rocking king and a ringing,'

        and the hour of patient, elaborate execution. It is in the conception only that the poet is the vates! In the labor of putting that conception into words, he is simply the artist.

        "A great poet has defined poetry to be 'emotion recollected in tranquillity.' No man with grief in his heart could sit straightway down to strain that grief through iambics! No man exulting in a delirium of joy, ever bubbles into anapæsts! Were this so, the poet would be the most wonderful of improvisators; and perhaps poetry would be no better than what improvisations usually are.

        "There can be no doubt that much of the most passionate verse in the English, or any other language, has been

                        'Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre.'

        "The act of composition is indeed attended with an emotion peculiar to itself and to the poet: and this emotion is sufficient of itself to give a glow and richness to the poet's language; yet it leaves him, at the same time, in such command of his faculties, that he is able to choose his words almost as freely, though by no means as deliberately, as the painter chooses his colors.

        "We are inclined to think that the emotion of the poet somewhat resembles in its metaphysical character those inexplicable feelings with which we all witness a tragic performance on the stage - feelings which, even while they rend the heart, are always attended by a large amount of vivid pleasure.

        "It would be easy to multiply quotations in confirmation of our remarks. Wordsworth speaks of himself as

                        'Not used to make
                        A present joy the matter of his song;'

        and Matthew Arnold separates, as we have separated, 'the hour of insight' from the hour of labor.

                        We cannot when we will
                        That fire which in the heart resides;
                        The spirit bloweth, and is still;
                        In mystery our soul abides:
                        But tasks in hours of insight willed,
                        May be through hours of gloom fulfilled.'

        "Is it not also a significant fact that the best love-verses have been written by men who, at the time of writing them, had long passed that age during which love is warmest, and the heart most susceptible?

        "The very restriction so much complained of in the Sonnet, the artist knows to be an advantage. It forces him to condensation, and if it sometimes induces a poetaster to stretch a thought to the finest tenuity, what argument is that against the Sonnet? As well might Jones object to the violin of Paganini, because Smith, his neighbor, is a wretched fiddler!

        "The Sonnet is designed, as it is peculiarly fitted, for the development of a single thought, emotion, or picture.

        "It is governed by another law not less imperative than that which determines its length. We know not how else to characterize it but as the law of unity! In a poem made up of a series of stanzas, the thought in the first stanza suggests the thought in the second, and both may be equally important. The concluding stanza may have wandered as far in its allusions from the opening stanza, as the last from the first sentence in an essay. In other words, the poet has the liberty of rambling somewhat, if his fancy so dispose him.

        "Now, in the Sonnet this suggestive progress from one

thought to another is inadmissible. It must consist of one leading idea around which the others are grouped for purposes of illustration only.

        "We claim for the Sonnet, as represented in English literature, a proud distinction. We could gather from it a greater body of tersely expressed and valuable thought, than from any equal quantity of those fugitive verses, the laws of which are less exacting.

        "It abounds in those 'great thoughts, grave thoughts,' which, embodied in lines of wonderful pregnancy, haunt the memory forever.

        "Brief as the Sonnet is, the whole power of a poet has sometimes been exemplified within its narrow bounds as completely as within the compass of an epic! Thought is independent of space; and it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the poet - the minister of thought - enjoys an equal independence.

        "To-day, his stature reaches the sky; to-morrow, he will shut himself up in the bell of a tulip or the cup of a lily!"

        In 1860, a small volume, comprising the best of Timrod's verses, produced during the eight or nine years previous, was issued by Ticknor & Fields, of Boston. A better first volume of the kind has seldom appeared anywhere. It was welcomed outside the author's immediate circle by a few cultivated Southern editors, and some even of the critics of the North did not hesitate to commend it.

        For example, "The Tribune" said: "These poems are worthy of a wide audience. They form a welcome offering to the common literature of our country. The author, whose name promises to be better known from this specimen of his powers, betrays a genuine poetic instinct in the selection

of his themes, and has treated them with a lively, delicate fancy, and a graceful beauty of expression." *

        The most elaborate performance in this book, indeed the longest poem Timrod ever wrote, is called "A Vision of Poesy." Its purpose is to show, in the subtle development of a highly gifted imaginative nature, the true laws which underlie and determine the noblest uses of the poetical faculty. The subject is one of difficulty, demanding for its successful treatment not only an originally comprehensive and subtle mind, but no little knowledge of psychological truths, and the philosophy of intellectual growth.

        Imagination, descriptive capacity, and metaphysical insight are active in elucidating the theme; and the result is a generally pleasing and impressive work, marred, however, by a too evident lack of harmony and unity of parts, proceeding

        * Such comparatively slender recognition as this, of course fell short of the poet's anticipations of success.

        Apropos of this volume, a kindly but discerning critic observes: - "The book was full of promise; it gave evidence of considerable culture, of a lively fancy, a delicate, and at times vigorous imagination, and a rare artistic power. Yet it fell almost dead from the press!

        "The few who had real critical taste, a genuine and native appreciation of excellence, felt and expressed their admiration; but the public had no niche for him, not, at least, until he had achieved success, and success was to him a bitter need, for not his living merely, but his life was staked upon it!

        "And the disappointment was peculiarly keen, because just at this juncture his other resources had failed. He had surrendered everything to his art.

         "He had hoped, earnestly and justly, to make a little rift through which the light of popular favor might steal, and now only clouds and shadows were closing round him." - From a Lecture on Timrod, and his Poetry, by Dr. J. Dickson Bruns.

from the fact that the narrative was composed in sections, and after the lapse of periods so long between the different bouts of composition, that much of the original fervor of both conception and execution must have evaporated. *

        The metrical form of "The Vision" is well chosen, and admirably managed. It is that employed by Shakspeare in his "Venus and Adonis," by Spenser in his "Astrophel," and Cowley in his least ambiguous verses; being, briefly, the elegiac metre, with its alternate rhyme, so warmly defended by Dryden, ending in the terseness of the rhyming couplet, in which the picture should be closed, or the sense clinched.

        But, of course, the chief merit of "The Vision" is to be found in the unfolding of its leading idea. To accomplish this, Timrod has introduced a story of the mental progress of a youth, possessed of brilliant poetic gifts, which are partially nullified, in the end, by the joint operation of mistaken views of his art, and a morbid subjectivity of nature, fatal to the acknowledgment of his genius by humanity at large.

        The story is divided into three Parts; each devoted to some particular phase of its hero's experience.

        As the boy's "mystical thought," his desire to comprehend something of the secrets of the Universe, suddenly bursts into utterance, he turns to his mother, she who had taught him that "most beautiful of all things" - speech, - saying:

        * After all, "The Vision of Poesy" cannot be considered as in any sense a mature effort.

        Excepting a few passages which declare themselves to the intelligent reader, the poem was written at a comparatively early age.

                        "But, mother! while our human words are rife
                        To us with meaning, other sounds there be,
                        Which seem and are the language of a life
                        Around, yet unlike ours - winds talk, the sea
                        Murmurs articulately, and the sky
                        Listens and answers, tho' inaudibly.

                        "By stream and spring, in glades and woodlands lone,
                        Beside our very cot I've gathered flowers
                        Inscribed with signs and characters unknown,
                        But the frail scrolls still baffle all my powers:
                        What is this language, and where is the key
                        That opes its weird and wondrous mystery?"

        The poor mother, from whom sordid cares and a life-time of the trouble which attaches to material toil had removed her own childhood and its visions, very far away, is first puzzled, and then alarmed, by these strange questionings. She recalls a marvel that attended her child's birth, once considered an omen of good, but now converted by superstitious fancy into a curse and prophecy of disaster! Tremulously she tells her son this story of his birth-night.

        Thenceforth the boy keeps his strange imaginings, which he perceives cannot be understood, locked in the depths of his own consciousness.

        Meanwhile, the quiet days speed on, and in due course of time "the thoughtful boy blossoms into youth." The "dream" which had haunted his childhood becomes the "deathless need" of his maturer years. A spirit of unrest, yet of beauty, it drives him to seek the heart of lonely forests, and to wander over distant hills.

        He communes, not only with the waters, the sky, and the flowers, but becomes the familiar of those wild creatures to whom the sight of ordinary men brings terror and dismay:

                        "The eagle knew him as she knew the blast,
                        And the deer did not flee him as he passed."

        There is a particular nook in the forest, to which the youth continually repairs. One night he comes to his favorite spot. The trees, "high and hushed," rise solemnly about him, and

                        "Silent, but not as slumbering, all things there
                        Wore to the youth's aroused imagination
                        An air of deep and solemn expectation."

        The presentiment is not a vain instinct merely, for there the Spirit of Poesy reveals herself to him, and in burning words she speaks of the glory, dignity, and loveliness of her divine art and mission.

        This is, I think, the most thoughtful and highly-wrought portion of the poem.

        Part the Second forms the connecting link between the opening and the concluding events of the poet's career.

        It is written in blank verse, and with characteristic care and skill. Here is a specimen of its felicity of style:

                        "The story came to me - it recks not whence -
                        In fragments. Oh! if I could tell it all -
                        If human speech indeed could tell it all -
                        'Twere not a whit less wondrous, than if I
                        Should find, untouched in leaf and stem, and bright
                        As when it bloomed three thousand years ago
                        On some Idalian slope, a perfect rose.
                        Alas! a leaf or two, and they perchance
                        Scarce worth the hiving - one or two dead leaves
                        Are the sole harvest of a summer's toil."

                        * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

                        "I have heard
                        Somewhere of some dead monarch, from the tomb,
                        Where he had slept a century and more,
                        Brought forth, that when the coffin was laid bare,
                        Albeit the body in its mouldering robes
                        Was fleshless, yet one feature still remained
                        Perfect, or perfect seemed at least; the eyes
                        Gleamed for a second on the startled crowd,
                        And then went out in ashes! * Even thus,
                        The story, when I drew it from the grave,
                        Where it had lain so long, did seem, I thought,
                        Not wholly lifeless; but even while I gazed,
                        To fix its features on my heart, and called
                        The world to wonder with me, lo! it proved
                        I looked upon a corpse!"

        As for the poet himself, he goes into "the busy world to seek his fate." In many lands, and to many peoples he sings

                        'Of all he thought, and all he dreamed and hoped
                        But - or because the people were intent

        * Tennyson, in his "Aylmer's Field," a tale which appeared after the publication of "The Vision," makes use of this very image, as follows:

                         "Dust are our frames; and gilded dust, our pride
                         Looks only for a moment whole and sound;
                        Like that long-buried body of the king
                        Found lying with his arms and ornaments,
                        Which at a touch of light, an air of heaven,
                        Slipt into ashes and was found no more."

         Of these two verses, assuredly that of the younger and obscurer poet is the more striking.

                        On other themes, or they were not prepared
                        To dream his dreams, or think the thoughts he thought,
                        Or - that not being as other men, he touched
                        No chord that vibrated from heart to heart,
                        The peoples would not hear, or hearing, turned
                        And went their way unheedful!"

        Thus the inevitable climax approaches, failure, disappointment, death. A love "not wisely placed," a genius not wisely directed, these induce a "sickness of the soul," and, gray before his time, his ideals shattered, and his true passion unappreciated, if not scorned, the poet seeks his ancient home, in order that he may look on its beloved scenes again before he himself is called hence, to be beheld of men no more.

        There is something in this description of the bard's latter and darker days; of his mournful disenchantment, his mild, yet profound despair, which is singularly pathetic; the more pathetic indeed, as the catastrophe, losing for an instant its idealism, becomes, as it were, half subjective in its nature, and points to the author's own melancholy doom!

        With the instinct of right art and genuine feeling, Timrod has taken care not to make his hero a bitter misanthrope, nor to leave him skeptical of the joy and glory "which may hereafter be revealed."

        Even his poetic work and mission are portrayed as not utterly barren and fruitless.

        Exalted is the moral, beautiful the philosophy embodied in these concluding lines:

                        "Thy life hath not been wholly without use,
                        Albeit that use is partly hidden now.
                        In thy unmingled scorn of any truce
                        With this world's specious falsehoods, often thou

                        Hast uttered through some all unworldly song,
                        Truths that for man might else have slumbered long.

                        "And these not always vainly on the crowd
                        Have fallen; some are cherished now, and some,
                        In mystic phrases wrapped as in a shroud,
                        Wait the diviner, who as yet is dumb
                        Upon the breast of God - the gate of birth
                        Closed on a dreamless ignorance of earth.

                        "And therefore, though thy name shall pass away,
                        Even as a cloud that hath wept all its showers,
                        Yet as that cloud shall live again one day
                        In the glad grass and in the happy flowers;
                        So in thy thoughts, though clothed in sweeter rhymes,
                        Thy life shall bear its flowers in future times!"

        Of the minor poems which followed "The Vision," it is unnecessary to speak in detail. The ablest of them have been included in the present edition.

        We now come to the period of the War, during the first months of which Timrod remained chiefly in Charleston, serving his country a thousand times more effectually with his pen, than he could possibly have served her with his sword.

        It was in 1861 that he inaugurated that remarkable series of poems, suggested by the incidents of the great conflict, tragic or triumphant, in which he struck a higher and firmer note than any hitherto elicited from his lyre.

        "Ethnogenesis" is the worthy leader of these sustained and earnest strains. The dignity and calmness of its tone, covering unsounded depths of ardor and enthusiasm; its subtle grace of imagination, feeling, and imagery, and the crisp purity of the versification are so artistically blended in this ODE, that one cannot criticise, but must simply and honestly

admire it! The concluding stanza cannot now be read, at least by any Southerner, without a yearning and passionate regret. How the Poet's cordial sympathetic temper reveals itself in these lines, which came more naturally to him than visions of violence and blood!

                        "But let our fears - if fears we have - be still,
                        And turn us to the future! Could we climb
                        Some mighty Alp, and view the coming time,
                        The rapturous sight would fill
                        Our eyes with happy tears!
                        Not only for the glories which the years
                        Shall bring us; not for lands from sea to sea,
                        And wealth, and power, and peace, though these shall be;
                        But for the distant peoples we shall bless,
                        And the hushed murmurs of a world's distress;
                        For, to give labor to the poor,
                        This whole sad planet o'er,
                        And save from want and crime the humblest door,
                        Is one among the many ends for which
                        God makes us great and rich!
                        The hour perchance is not yet wholly ripe
                        When all shall own it, but the type
                        Whereby we shall be known in every land,
                        Is that vast Gulf which laves our Southern strand,
                        And through the cold, untempered Ocean pours
                        Its genial streams, that far-off Arctic shores
                        May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze
                        Strange Tropic warmth, and HINTS of summer seas!"

        That resonant lyric, "A Call to Arms," succeeded "Ethnogenesis." It contains one of the few palpable conceits I can recall, which would seem not merely admissible, but charming.

        And next appeared a Tyrtaëan strain indeed, I mean the

lines on "Carolina;" - lines destined perhaps to outlive the political vitality of the State, whose antique fame they celebrate.

        I read them first, and was thrilled by their power and pathos, upon a stormy March evening in Fort Sumter! Walking along the battlements, under the red light of a tempestuous sunset, the wind steadily and loudly blowing from off the bar across the tossing and moaning waste of waters, driven inland; with scores of gulls and white sea-birds flying and shrieking round me, - those wild voices of Nature mingled strangely with the rhythmic roll and beat of the poet's impassioned music. The very spirit, or dark genius, of the troubled scene, appeared to take up, and to repeat such verses as -

                        "I hear a murmur as of waves
                        That grope their way through sunless caves,
                        Like bodies struggling in their graves,
                        Carolina!

                        "And now it deepens; slow and grand
                        It swells, as rolling to the land,
                        An ocean broke upon the strand,
                        Carolina!

                        "Shout! let it reach the startled Huns!
                        And roar with all thy festal guns!
                        It is the answer of thy sons!
                        Carolina!"

        At last, influenced by these and other poems of kindred force and fire, the public awoke to a sense of Timrod's unusual merit. Towards the close of 1862, a project was formed in Charleston, with the view of having an illustrated and highly embellished edition of Timrod's works published in

the city of London. Vizetelli, an Englishman of Italian blood, and an artist of some eminence, then the Southern War Correspondent of "The London News," offered to supply original illustrations of his own; and so warm was the support the proposition met with from some of the chief men and most opulent merchants of the State, that but little doubt was entertained of its immediate and practical realization. *

        The poet, now in jubilant spirits, collected all the compositions of which his taste approved, and had them printed near him, so that correct proof-sheets might be sent to the publishers across the Ocean. Among his war-lyrics he placed some poems, also lately written, of a more subjective tone and character, for example - "Katie," and "An Exotic;" both of which, from their references to English history, scenery, and manners, were likely to be appreciated in the "motherland." The former ("Katie") is dedicated to the lady whom Timrod subsequently married; and is full of charming details of her girlish walks through the streets of old Bury St. Edmunds; and of her innocent holiday pastime in the lovely country around it. The piece is almost pre-Raphaelite in the delicious minuteness of its word-painting.

        But alas! that evil Fortune, that haunted our poet from the cradle to the grave, that never left him for a season, but to return darker, grimmer, more ruthless than before; decreed that the publication scheme, which had aroused his best hopes and energies, by promising to make his genius known in the great centre of English literary art, should prove but a mockery and delusion after all!

* The intention, we learn, was "to present this edition to the author; the object being to bring him, in the highest style, before the world, and at the same time to secure to him a modest competence."

        In the hurry and pressure of great events, the solitary singer, "pipe he never so sweetly and boldly," was quite forgotten.

        Those gentlemen who had played the kindly rôle of patrons, found their own weightier interests, and no doubt the interests of the Commonwealth, endangered; therefore what more natural than the consignment by them of the poet's expectations to that region of "Limbo," which is said to engulf so many "vows unredeemed, and visions unfulfilled?"

        Although no reason was ever given to Timrod, for the abandonment of this scheme, he could form his own conjectures on the subject. Every hour his once bright anticipations grew duller, until ultimately they smouldered out, one by one, in the anguish, solitude, and bitterness of his soul. *

        * Years afterwards Timrod, on two occasions, alludes (in his correspondence) to the manner in which the scheme had died out. "The great plan," he writes, "for publishing an illustrated edition of my poems has (I believe) evaporated in smoke! So fades, so languishes, grows dim and dies, the hope of every poet who has not money!" In another, and more recent letter, he thus refers to the subject: "The project of publishing my poems in England has been silently but altogether dropped! An unspeakable disappointment! but I try to bear my lot - the lot," he adds, with a momentary bitterness, "of all impecunious poets." Next to the poet himself, this disappointment in regard to the English edition of his works, fell most heavily upon his mother. Perhaps in HER case, the disappointment was even greater, since, in extreme old age, she could scarcely look forward to the sharing of any possible literary triumph of her son in the future. The mention of her here, gives us the opportunity of quoting some passages from an interesting letter descriptive of this lady's family, her character, intellect, etc., written by one who knew her in all the most sacred and intimate relations of existence. Such as read them may think that our former assertion, or rather, inference, that the poet's genius was wholly derived from his father, ought to be considerably qualified. "Henry Timrod's mother was the daughter of Mr. Charles Prince, a citizen of Charleston, S.C., and one of whom, at his death, my father said, 'he was the most upright and honest man I ever knew.' "Mr. Prince was the son of English parents, who emigrated to Carolina just before the breaking out of the Revolution. "He married a Miss French, whose father, of the Swiss family of French, came over from Switzerland, and fought as an officer of Republican artillery, during the whole war." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * "My father (Wm. H. Timrod), at the early age of nineteen, married Miss Prince, then a young and beautiful girl of sixteen or seventeen. The perfection of her face and form caught the poet's fancy; the perfection of her character won and kept his HEART through the twenty-six years of their married life. "It was from her, more than from his gifted father, that my brother (Henry Timrod) derived that intense, passionate love of Nature which so distinguished him. Its sights and sounds always afforded her extreme delight. Shall I ever forget the almost childish rapture she testified, when, after a residence in the pent-up city all her life, she removed with me to the country? A walk in the woods to her was food and drink, and the sight of a green field was joy inexpressible. "From my earliest childhood, I can remember her love for flowers and trees and for the stars; how she would call our attention to the glintings of the sunshine through the leaves; to the afternoon's lights and shadows, as they slept quietly, side by side; and even to a streak of moonlight on the floor. "She would sit absorbed, watching the tree-branches as they waved in the wind, and say, 'Don't they seem to be whispering to each other in a language of their own?' "To this strong love of Nature, she added so correct a judgment in all things; so much sound practical sense; such self-abnegation and entire devotion to those she loved ; and such sweetness, forbearance, gentleness, that I think I can truly say, she was one of the most perfect characters I ever knew! "Her children loved her with a devotion rarely given even to parents."

        It was soon after the bloody and desperate battle of Shiloh, that Timrod joined the army of the West, as "War Correspondent" of the Charleston "Mercury."

        "The story," says Dr. Bruns, in his masterly Lecture on the Poet and his genius, "the story of his camp life would furnish a theme for mirth, if our laughter were not choked by tears! One can scarcely conceive a situation more hopelessly wretched than that of this child, as it were, suddenly flung down into the heart of that stormy retreat, and tossed like a straw on the crest of those crimson waves, from which he escaped as by a miracle."

        Out of the refluent tides of blood, from under the smoke of conflict, and the sickening fumes of slaughter, he staggered homeward, half blinded, bewildered, with a dull red mist before his eyes, and a shuddering horror at heart.

        But now, as if some beneficent spirit, who had long witnessed his troubles, and also the calm, brave front of patience wherewith he opposed them, had resolved that at the last, some sweetness should be mingled with the wormwood of his life, he exchanged the turmoil of his recent deadly experience, for what to him must have seemed, by comparison, a very Eden of peace and happiness!

        Removing to Columbia, S. C., whither his family had preceded him, he was enabled to become (but through what precise means I cannot tell) part proprietor and associate editor of the "South Carolinian," a daily paper, published

in the Capital, which promised to yield him a moderate, and what was better still, a permanent support.

        Thus provided for, as he fondly believed, Timrod saw the possibility of realizing what had long been the dearest wish of his soul. Miss Kate Goodwin, the "Katie" of his poetic visions, she whose charms are embalmed in his delicate yet glowing verse, came to this country from England in the spring of 1860. She accompanied her father, who came to visit his son (Mr. George M. Goodwin, long settled as a merchant in Charleston, S.C., and married to one of Henry Timrod's sisters), and also, in accordance with his physician's advice, who stated that a voyage across the Atlantic, and a residence of some months in a semi-Tropical latitude, might entirely re-establish his health. The change, however, did not benefit him, for he died three months after his arrival. The choice was then presented to Miss Goodwin of remaining with her bother's family, or of returning to England with her stepmother. She chose the former; and thus it happened that the poet was often thrown into her society.

        On the 12th of January, 1864, our poet came to the State Capital, prepared to assume his duties as editor, and in little more than a month, that is to say, on the 16th of the ensuing February, he married Miss Goodwin, taking his bride to a humble home, but one glorified, I venture to say, by anticipations as bright, pure, and ardent as ever flushed the fancy and elevated the heart of the richest and most prosperous of bridegrooms.

        It is pleasant to dwell upon his honeymoon, and the few months immediately succeeding it; to picture his cheerful walks from his home to the office, and from the office to his home again. He proved himself a judicious and able editor, and his industry never flagged.

        Once or twice during these comparatively halcyon days,

I received affectionate letters from him; but amid his incessant occupations he could do no more than give me an outline of his employments, prospects, and occasional business annoyances, which latter, however, as I gathered from his tone, were never permitted to ruffle his serene domestic atmosphere. "All the poetry in my nature," wrote he, "has been fagged out of me, I fear! I work very hard. Besides writing the 'leaders' of the paper, I often descend, as you may have noticed, into the local columns. My purpose is to show that a poet can drudge as well as a duller man, and therefore I don't complain! But, O God! for leisure enough to breathe, although at rarest intervals, the air of the Aonian mount! By the way," he inquires in the same note, "What think you of the War? Shall we ever see its end, favorable or unfavorable, glorious or fatal? Its end, deuce take me! but I sometimes fear it has been like the end of the Irishman's rope - cut off!"

        Another end, at least, was imminent, the end of his own hard-won quiet; his independence and partial prosperity.

        But just on the verge of the catastrophe, an intense joy was granted him. Upon Christmas Eve, 1864, his son WILLIE was born! - a child of unusual promise, and of a beauty described as exquisite.

        In a communication all couleur de rose, bubbling over with pride and delight, he says, "At length, my dear P-, we stand upon the same height of paternity - quite a celestial elevation to me! If you could only see my boy! Everybody wonders at him! He is so transparently fair; so ethereal!"

        A few weeks of dalliance with his infant beauty; of undisturbed calm in the little nest of a home he had reared for himself and his wife, and then came fearful reports of invasion; the rapid overwhelming march of the enemy, and upon the 17th of February, 1865 (just one year and a day,

since Timrod's marriage), the devoted city of Columbia was given up to the mercies of Sherman and his troops.

        What followed is known to all - the conflagration, the sack, the universal terror and despair! As one whose vigorous, patriotic editorials had made him obnoxious to Federal vengeance, Timrod was forced, while this foreign army occupied the town, to remain concealed. When they left, he rejoined his anxious "womankind," to behold, in common with thousands of others, such a scene of desolation as mortal eyes have seldom dwelt upon.

        An imperfect glimpse of his condition; of what he did and suffered for the next twelvemonth, may be obtained from this letter, addressed to me, and dated "Columbia, March 30th, 1866:

        "My dear P-: Nothing has come to me for the past year which has given me such pleasure as your letter of the - instant. I am overjoyed to renew our correspondence.

        "Dear old fellow! heart and hand, body, soul, and spirit, I am still yours!

        "I have the right poet's inclination to plunge in medias res. You ask me to tell you my story for the last year. I can embody it all in a few words: beggary, starvation, death, * bitter grief, utter want of hope! But let me be a little more particular, that you may learn where I stand. You know, I suppose, that the Sherman raid destroyed my business. Since that time I have been residing with my sister, Mrs. Goodwin. Both my sister and myself are completely impoverished. We have lived for a long period, and are still living, on the proceeds of the gradual sale of furniture and plate. We have -

* Five months before, on the 23d of October, 1865, Timrod's idolized child was taken from him. He died somewhat suddenly. In that little grave, a large portion of the father's heart was buried. The poet was never quite his old self again.

let me see! - yes, we have eaten two silver pitchers, one or two dozen silver forks, several sofas, innumerable chairs, and a huge - bedstead!!

        "Until December, I had no employment. Mr.- passed through Columbia in November on his way to the sea-board. He called on me, informed me that he was going to re-establish his paper in Charleston, and promised that I should have my old interest in it.

        "On reaching Charleston, he started 'The Carolinian,' and soon he wrote me (but addressing me as a mere employé), and offering a salary of fifteen dollars a week for daily editorials. Necessity compelled me to accept this offer.

        "I have now hacked on for four months, and as yet have failed to receive a single month's pay.

        "The plain truth is, Mr.- can't pay! He made a grave mistake in carrying his paper to Charleston. Under the shadow of the 'News' and 'Courier,' it is languishing, and must die! What I am going to do, I can't imagine.

        "As for supporting myself and a large family - wife, mother, sister and nieces, by literary work - 'tis utterly preposterous!

        "In a 'forlorn-hope' sort of mood, and as a mere experiment, I forwarded some poems in my best style to certain Northern periodicals, and in every instance they were coldly declined.

        "So all hope of thus turning my rhymes into bread must be resigned." Whereupon, with a self-mocking spurt of humor, he adds, "Little Jack Horner, who sang for his supper, and got his plum cake, was a far more lucky minstrel than I am! * * * To confess the truth, my dear P-, I not only feel that I can write no more verse, but I am perfectly indifferent to the fate of what I have already composed.

        "I would consign every line of it to eternal oblivion, for - one hundred dollars in hand! * * * * *

        "I can tell you nothing about Charleston, although in February, having a free Railroad ticket, I went down and spent three days there. My eyes were blind to everything and everybody but a few old friends. I dined with Bruns; had a night of it at Henry Raymond's, and went to see the lions in the circus!

        "The sum of this small experience of my native town is, that the people are generally impoverished, suffering, despondent, with all the spring and elasticity taken out of them. * * * * My wife has been very sick. Her low condition of health, indeed, makes me continually anxious."

        A fair conception of Timrod's editorial style - its picturesqueness and beauty, allied to much quiet power, may be obtained by a perusal of three brief articles of his, published in "The Carolinian."

        The first of these, evidently composed during the closing days of the war, is called

"THE ALABAMA."

of the mightiest navies of the world, yet keeping the ocean in defiance of all pursuit for - we forget - how many years! Flitting like a phantom across the waters, appearing at astonishingly short intervals in the most opposite quarters of the globe, we used to follow her track with something of that weird interest which was wont to thrill us in our boyhood when poring over a tale of the ghostly Dutchman of the Cape. At one time lost in the fogs of the Northern Atlantic, at another popping up in the region of the trade winds, scattering dismay among the clippers; and anon, far away in the direction of the dawn, where much more precious spoil might be reaped, or, if not reaped, then consigned to that vast locker of which the mythic 'Davy' of the sailor, is said to keep the key - such were the reports that reached us from month to month of this almost ubiquitous vessel. Now we heard, perhaps, that, in the neighborhood of the Golden Chersonesus, or under the rich shores of that 'utmost Indian isle Toprobane,' some homeward-bound Englishman had been startled by the dull boom of guns across the billows, while a red light upon the horizon informed him that the 'Alabama' was illuminating those remote seas with the fires of Confederate revenge; and, again a little later, it was bruited from port to port that she was speeding across the main - haply amazing the gentle islanders of the Pacific with the gleam of her beautiful but unfamiliar flag - to complete the circuit of her awful mission with the destruction of a few treasure ships of the Ophir of the West! The repeated achievement of the adventure has rendered the circumnavigation of the globe in these modern days a commonplace thing; but there was that in the errand upon which the 'Alabama' was bound, which reinvested the voyage with its old romance; so that, in accompanying the Southern cruiser upon her various paths, we used to experience a feeling somewhat resembling

that imaginative one which WORDSWORTH has expressed in these deep-toned lines:

                        'Almost as it was when ships were rare,
                        From time to time, like pilgrims, here and there,
                        Crossing the waters, doubt and something dark,
                        Of the old sea some reverential fear,
                        Were with us as we watched thee, noble bark.'

        "The career of the 'Alabama' was worthily closed. Challenged by a foe more powerful than herself, she sallied forth bravely to battle and went down in the sight of the coast of one people and of the ships of another, who each knew how to admire the valor which she had displayed. What a pity and what a wonder it is that the same generous appreciation of her glorious story, and its not less glorious end, is not shared in the country which enshrines the name of LAWRENCE! Who could believe, that did not know it, that we Southrons are expected by those who call us brethren to remember this gallant ship only as a corsair, and its venerated commander as a pirate."

        The two others, written at a later date, some months in fact after the surrender at Appomattox, are certainly fine specimens of "poetic prose."

"SPRING'S LESSONS."

        "Spring, thank Heaven, is not subject to radical rule, or pregnable to radical intrigues; otherwise, she would certainly be proscribed, outlawed or expatriated by Thaddeus Stevens and his crew. For Spring is a true reconstructionist - a reconstructionist in the best and most practical sense. There is not a nook in the land in which she is not at this moment exerting her influence, in preparing a way for the restoration of the South. No politician may oppose her; her power defies embarrassment; but she is not altogether independent

of help. She brings us balmy airs and gentle dews, golden suns and silver rains; and she says to us: 'These are the materials of the only work in which you need be at present concerned: avail yourselves of them to re-clothe your naked country and feed your impoverished people, and you will find that, in the discharge of that task, you have taken the course which will most certainly and most peacefully conduct you to the position which you desire. Turn not aside to bandy epithets with your enemies; stuff your ears like the princess in the 'Arabian Nights,' against words of insult and wrong; pause not to muse over your condition, or to question your prospects; but toil on bravely, silently, surely, and you will reap a reward to which the yellow water, talking bird, and the singing tree of the fairy tale, are not to be compared.'

        "Such are the words of wise and kindly counsel, which, if we attend rightly, we may all hear in the winds and read in the skies of spring. Nowhere, however, does she speak with so eloquent a voice or so pathetic an effect as in this ruined town. * She covers our devastated courts with images of renovation in the shape of flowers; she hangs once more in our blasted gardens the fragrant lamps of the jessamine; in the streets, she kindles the maple like a beacon announcing peace; and from amidst the charred and blackened ruins of once happy homes, she pours through the mouth of her favorite musician, the mocking-bird, a song of hope and joy. What is the lesson which she designs by these means to convey? It may be summed in a single sentence - forgetfulness of the past, effort in the present, and trust for the future!"

"NAMES OF THE MONTHS PHONETICALLY EXPRESSIVE."

* Columbia, S C.

find no sympathy from those who read v words with the eye, or hear them with the ear alone. We speak only to the rare few who possess an inner sense of which the common world knows nothing. The fancy is that each month has a name phonetically expressive (to their inner sense, mark you) of its character. For example, the winds seem to us to rumble in the word March as audibly as they did in the cave of Æolus. April falls from the tongue like silver rain. What name but May could be fitly given to that beautiful, blue-eyed, and exquisitely feminine month? June, sounded with the proper depth of tone, is exactly like the humming of bees. The wings of millions of insects and the rustle of innumerable leaves may be found in the words July and August. September whistles through more than its initial letter like an autumnal gale. October has a royal sound, that fills the mouth like Napoleon or Plantagenet. It is a name worthy of that imperial month, whose gorgeous sunsets and magnificent woods indicate its supremacy both in earth and sky. We have Burns' authority for asserting that 'November chill blows loud with angry sough.' Lastly, he to whom the mere syllables of December, January and February do not suggest all that belongs to Winter - its cheerful firesides as well as its ice and snow - lacks the organ we address.

        "With this fancy in our head, we often wonder how those people feel who leave this country or England for the South Temperate zone. Surely, when they 'see roses in December, ice in June,' they must undergo a moral sensation equivalent to the bodily one produced by standing on one's head."

        In the winter of 1866 I again heard from him.

"COLUMBIA, Nov. 19th, 1866.

        "MY DEAR P-: - Your letter found me a scribe in the

Governor's Office, where I work every day from 9 A.M. TO 7 P.M. I snatch a moment from my labor to answer your note. Yes; I have had a sad and hard struggle of it for the past six months, but just as I was about to despair of help from God or man, I received from Governor Orr a temporary appointment as an assistant secretary, or rather, clerk. The appointment is but for a month or so, in order to get through a certain amount of work which crowds upon the department at this time. It ensures me, however, a month's supply of bread and bacon; that devoured, I'll trust in God that something else will turn up. This last is no conventional remark. I am really learning, P-, to trust in God!

        "My health is very wretched. The doctors prescribe change of air, but, of course, that remedy is impossible at present. Both on this account, and to shake hands once more with you, old friend and true heart, I should like to accept the invitation to your home.

        "But here I must stay like a lugubrious fowl, to scratch for corn. I shall, however, keep your invitation in memory, and as soon as practicable, be assured, I will gladly take a turn or two upon your cot in the country.

        "You say nothing about Mrs. H-, and your boy, Willie! Ah, how ineffably dear that name has become to me now. He (my own lost Willie) was the sweetest child. But every body thought him too ethereal to live, even when he seemed in the most perfect health!"

        In the January of 1867, Timrod, addressing his friend, Judge Bryan, says: "My term of service in the Executive office ended at the close of the session. It was no child's play. On two occasions I wrote from 10 o'clock one morning until the sunrise of the next day (a brief intermission for dinner being allowed).

        "A laborious life, yet not half so laborious, after all, as having nothing to do!

        "The wages of the office I held barely sufficed to feed our family. We had still to depend upon the sale of furniture and plate for rent. On the 24th we must perforce leave the house we now occupy. I'm looking for a small hole to squeeze ourselves in!"

        A flitting glimpse of hope had, some months before, beguiled him in the shape of an invitation from the publisher, Mr. Richardson, then on a visit to the South, to leave his home troubles awhile, and to become his (Mr. R.'s) guest in New York city. Something, too, was rather vaguely said of the Publisher's willingness to undertake an edition of a few of Timrod's selected poems; but the chronic impecuniosity of the latter made void the whole plan as soon almost as conceived. I can never cease to regret this; for had Timrod made the personal acquaintance of some among the New York and Boston Literati, it is quite possible that his fate would have been wholly different. Such high-hearted men as Bryant, Whipple, Holmes, and Whittier, would have recognized equally the genius of the man, and his modest worth and purity of temperament. Some beneficent suggestion, some practical help might have reached him from them; since the fact that in a special sense he was the poet of his section, could have weighed in their estimation but little against the claims of his intellect, his character, and, I may add, his undeserved misfortunes. * * *

        In the April of 1867 I received a note from my friend in which he says that my long-standing invitation to the country would soon be answered by him personally. "Our watchful Doctor," he proceeds, "has been urging me more persistently than ever to change the air. I shall obey him. You tempt me, dear P-, not only with your light, bracing,

aromatic pine-land atmosphere - the very thing I need - and with the happy prospect of your own society, but you speak of the publishers sending you their new books! You can afford to put up with what Mr. Simms really appears to consider appetizing fare, so unctuously does he refer to it (I mean 'hog and hominy') if, mean time, instead of having your imagination starved, it (or she?) is free to wander in fresh literary pastures.

        "Apropos of literature and rhymsters, I have lately had a modest request preferred me by a committee of Richmond ladies, intent upon establishing a Bazaar, or something, in that city. It was, to write within a fortnight, a poem on the history of 'Fort Sumter,' beginning with the shot at the 'STAR OF THE WEST,' and ending with the elevation of the United States flag over the ruins of the Fort!! This poem I was further requested to make long enough to fill eighty printed octavo pages, or - it was obligingly qualified - less!! Need I say that I respectfully declined to undertake the task?"

        In less than a week the poet himself had followed his letter. He found me with my family, established in a crazy wooden shanty, dignified as a cottage, near the track of the main Georgia Railroad, and about sixteen miles from Augusta. Our little apology for a dwelling was perched on the top of a hill, overlooking in several directions hundreds of leagues of pine-barren; there were, as yet, neither garden nor enclosure near it, and a wilder, more desolate, and savage-looking home, could hardly have been seen east of the great prairies. Hither, so to speak, had the eruption of war hurled us; for our old residence on the beautiful Carolina coast had been destroyed by fire; the State of our nativity was a blackened, smoking ruin, and we were consequently grateful for any shelter, however lowly, in which

it was possible to live at peace and in freedom! Human hearts can be as warm in a shanty, with leaking roof and shutterless windows, as in the palace of the Doges, and in the enthusiasm of the poet's welcome we strove to make amends for the general poverty of his accommodations, and a very perceptible coarseness of the cuisine. But he, poor fellow, had been the victim of privations so much worse, that he cared for none of these things, or rather, he professed (with frequent deep-drawn sighs of relief), to be perfectly content in the mere consciousness of present freedom from anxiety.

        A month's sojourn in our Robinson Crusoe solitude greatly improved both his strength and spirits. Leisure, saunterings through the great balmy pine forest, luxurious explorations of shadowy glens and valleys, full of exquisite varieties of wild flowers; the warm, dry, delicious climate which invited him to take his dolce far niente under the boughs of murmuring trees, outstretched upon a couch of brown pineneedles, as elastic as it was odorous, all promised to bring back his poetical enthusiasm, and to set in genial motion the half frozen springs of his invention and fancy. But his term of holiday was too limited.

        Circumstances compelled his return to the capital, and there the old, terrible, destructive life of want recommenced. For let it be distinctly and finally understood, that in alluding to Timrod's poverty I do not mean the factitious poverty of your well-to-do ingrate, whether epicure or gourmand, who, in the midst of substantial plenty, whimpers over a lost paradise of venison, French patés, and champagne, but that frequent actual lack of food, those grim encounters with starvation, which sap the life, chill the heart-blood, madden the brain! * * * * * * *

        * * *In the latter summer-tide of this same year, I

again persuaded him to visit me. Ah! how sacred now, how sad and sweet are the memories of that rich, clear, prodigal August of '67!

        We would rest on the hill-sides, in the swaying golden shadows, watching together the Titanic masses of snow-white clouds which floated slowly and vaguely through the sky, suggesting by their form, whiteness, and serene motion, despite the season, flotillas of icebergs upon Arctic seas. Like lazzaroni we basked in the quiet noons, sunk into depths on depths of reverie, or perhaps of yet more "charméd sleep." Or we smoked, conversing lazily between the puffs,

                        "Next to some pine whose antique roots just peeped
                        From out the crumbling bases of the sand."

        But the evenings, with their gorgeous sunsets "rolling down like a chorus," and the "gray-eyed melancholy gloaming," were the favorite hours of the day with him. He would often apostrophize twilight in the language of Wordsworth's sonnet:

                        "Hail, twilight! sovereign of one peaceful hour!
                        Not dull art thou as undiscerning night;
                        But only studious to remove from sight
                        Day's mutable distinctions."

        "Yes," said he, "she is indeed the sovereign of one peaceful hour! In the hardest, busiest time, one feels the calm, merciful-minded queen stealing upon one in the fading light, and 'whispering,' as Ford has it (or is it Fletcher?) 'whispering' tranquility!"

        When in-doors, and disposed to read, he took much pleasure in perusing the poems of Robert Buchanan and Miss Ingelow. The latter's Ballads particularly delighted him.

One, written "in the old English manner," he quickly learned by heart, repeating it with a relish and fervor indescribable.

        Here is the opening stanza:

                        "Come out and hear the waters shoot, the owlet hoot, the owlet hoot;
                        Yon crescent moon, a golden boat, hangs dim behind the tree, O!
                        The dropping thorn makes white the grass, O! sweetest lass, and sweetest lass
                        Come out and smell the ricks of hay adown the croft with me, O!"

        With but a slight effort of memory I can vividly recall his voice and manner in repeating these simple yet beautiful lines.

        They were the last verses I ever heard from the poet's lips.

        Just as the woods were assuming their first delicate autumnal tints, Timrod took his leave of us. In a conversation on the night but one previous to his departure, we had been speaking of Dr. Parr and other literary persons of unusual age, when he observed: "I hav'nt the slightest desire, P-, to be an octogenarian, far less a centenarian, like old Parr; but I DO hope that I may be spared until I am fifty or fifty-five."

        "About Shakespeare's age," I suggested.

        "Oh!" he replied, smiling, "I was not thinking of THAT; but I'm sure that after fifty-five I would begin to wither, mind and body, and one hates the idea of a mummy, intellectual or physical. Do you remember that picture of extreme old age which Charles Reade gives us in 'Never too Late to Mend?' George Fielding, the hero, is about going away

from England to try his luck in Australia. All his friends and relations are around him, expressing their sorrow at his enforced voyage; all but his grandfather, aged ninety-two, who sits stolid and mumbling in his arm-chair.

        " 'Grandfather!' shouts George into the deafened ears, 'I'm going a long journey; mayhap, shall never see you again; speak a word to me before I go!' Grandfather looks up, brightens for a moment, and cackles feebly out, 'George, fetch me some snuff from where you're going. See now (half whimpering), I'm out of snuff.' A good point in the way of illustration, but not a pleasant picture."

        On the 13th of September, ten days after Timrod's return to Columbia, he wrote me the following note:

        "DEAR P-: I have been too sick to write before, and am still too sick to drop you more than a few lines. You will be surprised and pained to hear that I have had a severe hemorrhage of the lungs. It came upon me without a moment's warning, my mouth being filled with blood while I was listening to Wm. Talley talking.

        "I did not come home an instant too soon. I found them without money or provisions. * Fortunately, I brought with me a small sum - I won't tell you how small - but six dollars of it was from the editor of the 'Opinion,' for my last poem. * * *

        "I left your climate to my injury. But not only for the

        * When one thinks how little - how very little of the "world's gear" would have served to make this most unexacting of mortals content, nay, happy! there is something in the dogged persistence and cruel energy of the fate which harassed and wounded him along almost every yard of his rugged life-path, that resembled the virulence of a Greek Nemesis, rather than the chastenings of a benignant Providence.

sake of my health, I begin already to look back with longing regret to 'Copse Hill.' You have all made me feel as if I had two beloved homes!

        "I wish that I could divide myself between them; or that I had wings, so that I might flit from one to other in a moment.

        "I hope soon to write you at length. Yours, etc."

        Again on the 16th I heard from him, thus:

        "Yesterday I had a still more copious hemorrhage! It occurred in the street - the blood came in jets from my mouth; you might have tracked me home in crimson!

        "I am lying supine in bed, forbidden to speak, or make any exertion whatever. But I can't resist the temptation of dropping you a line, in the hope of calling forth a score or two from you in return.

        "An awkward time this for me to be sick! We are destitute of funds, almost of food. But God will provide!

        "I send you a Sonnet, written the other day, as an Obituary for Mr. Harris Simons. Tell me what you think of it - be sure! Love to your mother, wife, and my precious Willie" (since the death of his own child, he had turned with a yearning affection to my boy). "Let me hear from you soon - very soon! You'll do me more good than medicines!" etc.

        The Sonnet he mentions is here before me, written in pencil on a scant fragment of paper, but in a calligraphy clear and bold as ever:

IN MEMORIAM - HARRIS SIMONS.

                        God hangs the crown, the pinion, and the lyre;
                        And thou hast won them all. Could we desire
                        To quench that diadem's celestial light;
                        To hush thy song and stay thy heavenward flight,
                        Because we miss thee by this autumn fire?
                        Ah, no! ah, no! - chant on! - soar on! - reign on!
                        For we are better - thou art happier thus!
                        And haply from the splendor of thy throne,
                        Or haply from the echoes of thy psalm,
                        Something may fall upon us, like the calm
                        To which thou shalt hereafter welcome us!"

        Reading these lines, no shadow of a presentiment oppressed me. I simply admired the art of the Sonnet, and its tender Christian feeling, unconscious that another "In Memoriam" would soon be called for, steeped in the bitterness of an irremediable grief!

        On the 25th of the month this confidence in Timrod's recovery was confirmed by a letter from Mrs. Goodwin.

        "Our brother," she writes, "is decidedly better; and if there be no recurrence of the hemorrhage, will, I hope, be soon convalescent!"

        A week and upwards passed on in silence. I received no more communications from Columbia. But early in October a vaguely threatening report reached my ears. On the 9th it was mournfully confirmed. Forty-eight hours before, Henry Timrod had expired!

        The circumstances attendant upon his last illness and death, are related by his sister in terms at once so graphically minute, and so tenderly pathetic, that I cannot but feel justified in laying the letter - although a private one - before my readers.

                        "Alas! alas! in every tremulous line
                        We see but heartbreak and the touch of tears!"

"COLUMBIA, October 22d, 1867.

"MY DEAR FRIEND:

        "You are, I know, anxiously awaiting the particulars of those last sad days!

        "Painful as the effort is, I feel that to you, his dearest friend, I ought at once to write.

        "You will remember that my last letter was scarcely as hopeful as the former had been. * Hal's apprehension of another hemorrhage seemed to increase. Each cough he gave, I saw the look of uneasiness on his face, and each cough sent a thrill of terror to my heart!

        "The idea that he was to choke to death by a sudden rush of blood from the lungs, haunted him like a spectre; no persuasions could induce him to believe that there was really no danger

        "His fears, alas! proved but too sure premonitions of the truth. On Wednesday morning (2d of October), at two o'clock, I was roused to witness once more the life stream flowing from his lips, while every instant respiration became more difficult.

        "The hemorrhage, however, was soon checked, but its effect on his nervous system was fatal! He never rallied again!

        "Doctors Gibbes and Talley spent hours by his bedside, endeavoring by every human means to arrest the progress of the disease; but pneumonic symptoms made their appearance, and hope was gone!

        "On Friday morning Dr. Gibbes said, 'Mr. Timrod, I think it my duty to tell you that I can see no chance of your recovery!' Never shall I forget the fearfully startled expression of my brother's face at this announcement. After

* This note miscarried.

the Doctor went, said to me, 'And is this to be the end of all - so soon! so soon! and I have achieved so little! I thought to have done so much! I had just before my first attack fallen into a strain of such pure and delicate fancies. I do think this winter I would have done more than I have ever done; yes, I should have written more purely, and with a greater delicacy. And then I have loved you all so much! Oh! how can I leave you?'

        "A little while after he said, 'Do you not think I could will to live?' adding with a smile, 'I might make an effort, like Mrs. Dombey, you know!'

        "And indeed, so resolutely did he seem to combat with the powers of Death, that the rest of that day (Friday) he appeared to grow stronger, and the symptoms were more favorable; so much more so, in fact, that both physicians, at night, pronounced a change for the better.

        "Captain Hugh Thompson sat up with him that night, I bearing him company. He begged us to talk, saying he liked to hear our voices; and in the morning observed, 'I have enjoyed this night; I slept when I wanted, and listened when I liked.'

        "I must not omit to say, that from the first serious hemorrhage his mind turned to religious subjects, and that the New Testament was always near his pillow. He would every now and then ask me to read a chapter from the Gospels, and to pray with him.

        "On Saturday morning be seemed cheerful, and even sanguine; but in the afternoon the great pain in his side, and difficulty of breathing, returned. He requested the subcutaneous injection of a portion of morphine. This had given him relief several times before. It was done, and he fell into a gentle sleep.

        "I sat up with him again, intending to call his wife to

take my place at two o'clock; but at two he awoke, and O! God! that awakening!

        "It was the commencement of the last struggle. The strongest convulsions shook his already worn-out frame. To listen to those groans - those shrieks, was unutterable horror! - was agony untold! For hours the struggle lasted, and then came for a space partial quiet and consciousness. He knew that he was dying. 'Oh!' I murmured to him, 'you will soon be at rest NOW.' 'Yes,' he replied, in a tone so mournful, it seemed the wail of a life-time of desolation; 'yes, my sister, but love is sweeter than rest!'

        "In the early hush of that Sabbath morning, he for the first time commemorated the love and sufferings of our ascended Lord; the Holy Communion having been administered to him by a clergyman of our church.

        "Most strange, solemn, and sad was the sight to those who stood about his death-bed. He looked upon the struggle of life and death as if from the position of an earnest but outside observer. Once he said, 'And SO THIS is Death! the struggle has come at last. It is curious to watch it. It appears like two tides - two tides advancing and retreating, these powers of Life and Death! Now the power of Death recedes; but wait, it will advance again triumphant.' Then, with a look of eager, yet hushed expectation, he seemed to watch the conflict.

        "Again he said, 'So this is Death! how strange! were I a metaphysician I would analyze it; but as it is, I can only watch.'

        "Words fail to describe the awful solemnity with which these dying words of the poet impressed all who heard him. Everybody was in tears.

        "Once, turning to me, he asked, 'Do you remember that little poem of mine?

                        ' "Somewhere on this earthly planet
                        In the dust of flowers to be,
                        In the dew-drop and the sunshine
                        Waits a solemn hour for me." '

        " 'Yes,' I replied, 'and now that hour, which then seemed so far away, has come.'

        "Often he would fold his arms, and repeat two lines of his favorite hymn:

        'Jesus, lover of my soul,' etc.

        "At every conscious interval his prayers to our atoning Lord were unceasing.

        "During the earlier part of the last night he slept for many hours. Awaking, he missed me, and asked that I should be called. On my going to him, he said, 'Well, Emily, I am really dying now, but my trust is in Christ.' Then quoting those lines of Milton, 'Death rides triumphant,' etc., he added, 'Oh, may I be able to say, thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.'

        "An unquenchable thirst consumed him. Nothing could allay that dreadful torture. He whispered, as I placed the water to his lips, 'Don't you remember that passage I once quoted to you from "King John?" I had always such a horror of quenchless thirst, and now I suffer it!' He alluded to the passage -

                        "And none of you will let the Winter come,
                        To thrust his icy fingers in my maw!"

        "Just a day or two before he left on a visit to you at 'Copse Hill,' in one of our evening rambles he had repeated the passage to me with a remark on the extraordinary force of the words.

        "Katie took my place by him at 5 o'clock (in the morning), and never again left his side. The last spoonful of water she gave him, he could not swallow. 'Never mind,' he said, 'I shall soon drink of the river of Eternal Life.'

        "Shortly after he slept peacefully in Christ.

        "He died at the very hour which, years ago, he had predicted would be his death-hour. The whisper, 'He is gone!' went forth as 'day purpled in the zenith!' " etc., etc.

        On the - of October, the mortal remains of the poet, so worn and shattered, were buried in the cemetery of Trinity Church, Columbia.

        There, in the ruined capital of his native State, whence scholarship, culture, and social purity have been banished to give place to the orgies of semi-barbarians and the political trickery of adventurers and traitors - there, tranquil amid the vulgar turmoil of factions, reposes the dust of one of the truest and sweetest singers this country has given to the world.

        Nature, kinder to his senseless ashes than ever Fortune had been to the living man, is prodigal around his grave - unmarked and unrecorded though it be - of her flowers and verdant grasses, of her rains that fertilize, and her purifying dews. The peace he loved, and so vainly longed for through stormy years, has crept to him at last, but only to fall upon the pallid eyelids, closed forever - upon the pulseless limbs and the breathless, broken heart! Still it is good to know that -

                        "After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well."

        Yet, from this mere material repose, this quiet of decaying atoms, surely the most sceptical of thinkers, in contemplation of such a life, and such a death, must instinctively look

from earth to heaven; from the bruised and mouldering clod to the spirit infinitely exalted, and radiant in redemption,

                        "A calm, a beautiful, a sacred star,"

        thus imagining, and perchance believing, though it be but for an hour, in the mysterious ameliorations of eternity!

        Were one to sum up the idiosyncrasies of Timrod's genius and poetic manner, I think it would be just to notice in the first place, the simplicity, clearness, purity, and straight-forward force of his imagination, which within its appointed bounds (and these limitations are as strictly marked as its vivid capabilities themselves) is always a true enchanter, not owning the slightest relation to that mechanical faculty, so commonly confounded with imagination, which, instead of evolving its material out of the heart of its own electric being, is content to work from without, piling up a tedious catalogue of qualities, whether its attempts be directed towards description merely, or towards the subtleties of spiritual analysis. Thus it happens that Timrod's productions carry with them always "a firm body of thought." They do not appeal, like too many of Edgar Poe's, to our sense of rhythmic harmony alone; nor are they charming, but mystic utterances, which here and there may strike a vaguely solemn echo in the heart of the visionary dreamer.

        No! beneath the surface of his delicate imagery, and rhythmic sweetness of numbers, rest deeply imbedded the "golden ores of wisdom."

        As an artist, he fulfilled one of Coleridge's many definitions of poetry ("the best words in the best order"), with a tact as exquisite as it was unerring. And his style is literally himself! "It has the form, and follows the movement of his

nature, and is shaped into the expression of the exact mood, sentiment, or thought out of which the poem springs. Therefore his compositions - with all their elegance, finish, and superb propriety of diction - always leave the impression of having been born, not manufactured or made."

        His morale is perfect. What can speak more emphatically for the native soundness, wholesomeness, and untainted virility of his genius, than the absence from his works of all morbid arraignments of the Eternal justice or mercy; all blasphemous hardihood and whining complaint - in a word, all Byronism of sentiment, despite the ceaseless trials of his individual experience, his sorrows, humiliations, and corroding want.

        While other poets, "the curled darlings of Fortune," were, like Master Stephen, deliberately procuring "stools to be melancholy upon," ostentatiously showing themselves "sad as Night for very wantonness," he whose pains were only too real, into whose soul the iron had deeply entered, could forget himself in his divine art, and sing for us many a strain as fresh and breezy as the west wind "laden with woodland fragrance," as healthfully inspiriting as the breath of a May morning!

        There were likewise in his intellect and temperament, to appear occasionally in his verses, a certain arch, Ariel-like humor and delightful playfulness of fancy. His little poem of "Baby's Age," his "Præceptor Amat," etc., indicate a vein of sentiment genial, sportive and airy, that might, under favorable auspices, have been developed into many kindred pieces of a gay fanciful humor, calculated to relieve the pervading earnestness of his general style of composition and reflection.

        I cannot more fitly close this imperfect sketch, than with Dr. Bruns' graphic description of Timrod's personal appearance,

and of some prominent traits of his social character:

        "In stature," he says, "Timrod was far below the medium height. He had always excelled in boyish sports, and as he grew to manhood, his unusual breadth of shoulder still seemed to indicate a physical vigor which the slender wrists, thin, transparent hands, and habitually lax attitude, but too plainly contradicted.

        "The square jaw was almost stern in its strongly pronounced lines, the mouth large, the lips exquisitely sensitive, the gray eyes set deeply under massive brows, and full of a melancholy and pleading tenderness, which attracted attention to his face at once, as the face of one who had thought and suffered much.

        "His walk was quick and nervous, with an energy in it that betokened decision of character, but illy sustained by the stammering speech; for in society he was the shyest and most undemonstrative of men. To a single friend whom he trusted, he would pour out his inmost heart; but let two or three be gathered together, above all, introduce a stranger, and he instantly became a quiet, unobtrusive listener, though never a moody, or uncongenial one!

        "Among men of letters, he was always esteemed as a most sympathetic companion; timid, reserved, unready if taken by surprise, but highly cultivated, and still more highly endowed.

        "The key to his social character was to be found in the feminine gentleness of his temperament. He shrank from noisy debate, and the wordy clash of argument, as from a blow! It stunned and bewildered him, and left him in the mêlée alike incapable of defence or attack. And yet, when some burly protagonist would thrust himself too rudely into the ring, and try to bear down opposition by sheer vehemence

of declamation, from the corner where he sat ensconced in unregarded silence, he would suddenly sling out some sharp, swift pebble of thought, which he had been slowly rounding, and smite with an aim so keen and true as rarely failed to bring down the boastful Anakim!"

DEDICATION.

TO K. S. G.

                        Fair Saxon, in my lover's creed,
                        My love were smaller than your meed,
                        And you might justly deem it slight,
                        As wanting truth as well as sight,
                        If, in that image which is shrined
                        Where thoughts are sacred, you could find
                        A single charm, or more or less,
                        Than you to all kind eyes possess.
                        To me, even in the happiest dreams,
                        Where, flushed with love's just dawning gleams,
                        My hopes their radiant wings unfurl,
                        You're but a simple English girl,
                        No fairer, grace for grace arrayed,
                        Than many a simple Southern maid;
                        With faults enough to make the good
                        Seem sweeter far than else it would;
                        Frank in your anger and your glee,
                        And true as English natures be,
                        Yet not without some maiden art
                        Which hides a loving English heart.

                        Still there are moments, brief and bright,
                        When fancy, by a poet's light,

                        Beholds you clothed with loftier charms
                        Than love e'er gave to mortal arms.
                        A spell is woven on the air
                        From your brown eyes and golden hair,
                        And all at once you seem to stand
                        Before me as your native land,
                        With all her greatness in your guise,
                        And all her glory in your eyes;
                        And sometimes, as if angels sung,
                        I hear her poets on your tongue.
                        And, therefore, I, who from a boy
                        Have felt an almost English joy
                        In England's undecaying might,
                        And England's love of truth and right,
                        Next to my own young country's fame
                        Holding her honor and her name,
                        I - who, though born where not a vale
                        Hath ever nursed a nightingale,
                        Have fed my muse with English song
                        Until her feeble wing grew strong -
                        Feel, while with all the reverence meet
                        I lay this volume at our feet,
                        As if through your dear self I pay,
                        For many a deep and deathless lay,
                        For noble lessons nobly taught,
                        For tears, for laughter, and for thought,
                        A portion of the mighty debt
                        We owe to Shakespeare's England yet!

POEMS OF HENRY TIMROD.

KATIE.

                        It may be through some foreign grace,
                        And unfamiliar charm of face;
                        It may be that across the foam
                        Which bore her from her childhood's home,
                        By some strange spell, my Katie bought,
                        Along with English creeds and thought -
                        Entangled in her golden hair -
                        Some English sunshine, warmth, and air!
                        I cannot tell - but here to-day,
                        A thousand billowy leagues away
                        From that green isle whose twilight skies
                        No darker are than Katie's eyes.
                        She seems to me, go where she will,
                        An English girl in England still!

                        I meet her on the dusty street,
                        And daisies spring about her feet;
                        Or, touched to life beneath her tread,
                        An English cowslip lifts its head;
                        And, as to do her grace, rise up
                        The primrose and the buttercup!

                        I roam with her through fields of cane,
                        And seem to stroll an English lane,
                        Which, white with blossoms of the May,
                        Spreads its green carpet in her way!
                        As fancy wills, the path beneath
                        Is golden gorse, or purple heath:
                        And now we hear in woodlands dim
                        Their unarticulated hymn,
                        Now walk through rippling waves of wheat,
                        Now sink in mats of clover sweet,
                        Or see before us from the lawn
                        The lark go up to greet the dawn!
                        All birds that love the English sky
                        Throng round my path when she is by:
                        The blackbird from a neighboring thorn
                        With music brims the cup of morn,
                        And in a thick, melodious rain
                        The mavis pours her mellow strain!
                        But only when my Katie's voice
                        Makes all the listening woods rejoice
                        I hear - with cheeks that flush and pale -
                        The passion of the nightingale!

                        Anon the pictures round her change,
                        And through an ancient town we range,
                        Whereto the shadowy memory clings
                        Of one of England's Saxon kings,
                        And which to shrine his fading fame
                        Still keeps his ashes and his name.

                        Quaint houses rise on either hand,
                        But still the airs are fresh and bland,
                        As if their gentle wings caressed
                        Some new-born village of the West.
                        A moment by the Norman tower
                        We pause; it is the Sabbath hour!
                        And o'er the city sinks and swells
                        The chime of old St. Mary's bells,
                        Which still resound in Katie's ears
                        As sweet as when in distant years
                        She heard them peal with jocund din
                        A merry English Christmas in!
                        We pass the abbey's ruined arch,
                        And statelier grows my Katie's march,
                        As round her, wearied with the taint
                        Of Transatlantic pine and paint,
                        She sees a thousand tokens cast
                        Of England's venerable Past!
                        Our reverent footsteps lastly claims
                        The younger chapel of St. James,
                        Which, though, as English records run,
                        Not old, had seen full many a sun,
                        Ere to the cold December gale
                        The thoughtful Pilgrim spread his sail.
                        There Katie in her childish days
                        Spelt out her prayers and lisped her praise,
                        And doubtless, as her beauty grew,
                        Did much as other maidens do -
                        Across the pews and down the aisle
                        Sent many a beau-bewildering smile,

                        And to subserve her spirit's need
                        Learned other things beside the creed!
                        There, too, to-day her knee she bows,
                        And by her one whose darker brows
                        Betray the Southern heart that burns
                        Beside her, and which only turns
                        Its thoughts to Heaven in one request,
                        Not all unworthy to be blest,
                        But rising from an earthlier pain
                        Than might beseem a Christian fane.
                        Ah! can the guileless maiden share
                        The wish that lifts that passionate prayer?
                        Is all at peace that breast within?
                        Good angels! warn her of the sin!
                        Alas! what boots it? who can save
                        A willing victim of the wave?
                        Who cleanse a soul that loves its guilt?
                        Or gather wine when wine is spilt?

                        We quit the holy house and gain
                        The open air; then, happy twain,
                        Adown familiar streets we go,
                        And now and then she turns to show,
                        With fears that all is changing fast,
                        Some spot that's sacred to her Past.
                        Here by this way, through shadows cool,
                        A little maid, she tripped to school;
                        And there each morning used to stop
                        Before a wonder of a shop

                        Where, built of apples and of pears,
                        Rose pyramids of golden spheres;
                        While, dangling in her dazzled sight,
                        Ripe cherries cast a crimson light,
                        And made her think of elfin lamps,
                        And feast and sport in fairy camps,
                        Whereat, upon her royal throne
                        (Most richly carved in cherry-stone),
                        Titania ruled, in queenly state,
                        The boisterous revels of the fête!
                        'Twas yonder, with their "horrid" noise,
                        Dismissed from books, she met the boys,
                        Who, with a barbarous scorn of girls,
                        Glanced slightly at her sunny curls,
                        And laughed and leaped as reckless by
                        As though no pretty face were nigh!
                        But - here the maiden grows demure -
                        Indeed she's not so very sure,
                        That in a year, or haply twain,
                        Who looked e'er failed to look again,
                        And sooth to say, I little doubt
                        (Some azure day, the truth will out!)
                        That certain baits in certain eyes
                        Caught many an unsuspecting prize;
                        And somewhere underneath these eaves
                        A budding flirt put forth its leaves!

                        Has not the sky a deeper blue,
                        Have not the trees a greener hue,

                        And bend they not with lordlier grace
                        And nobler shapes above the place
                        Where on one cloudless winter morn
                        My Katie to this life was born?
                        Ah, folly! long hath fled the hour
                        When love to sight gave keener power,
                        And lovers looked for special boons
                        In brighter flowers and larger moons.
                        But wave the foliage as it may,
                        And let the sky be ashen gray,
                        Thus much at least a manly youth
                        May hold - and yet not blush - as truth:
                        If near that blessed spot of earth
                        Which saw the cherished maiden's birth
                        No softer dews than usual rise,
                        And life there keeps its wonted guise,
                        Yet not the less that spot may seem
                        As lovely as a poet's dream;
                        And should a fervid faith incline
                        To make thereof a sainted shrine,
                        Who may deny that round us throng
                        A hundred earthly creeds as wrong,
                        But meaner far, which yet unblamed
                        Stalk by us and are not ashamed?
                        So, therefore, Katie, as our stroll
                        Ends at this portal, while you roll
                        Those lustrous eyes to catch each ray
                        That may recall some vanished day,
                        I - let them jeer and laugh who will -
                        Stoop down and kiss the sacred sill!

                        So strongly sometimes on the sense
                        These fancies hold their influence,
                        That in long well-known streets I stray
                        Like one who fears to lose his way.
                        The stranger, I, the native, she,
                        Myself, not Kate, had crossed the sea;
                        And changing place, and mixing times,
                        I walk in unfamiliar climes!
                        These houses, free to every breeze
                        That blows from warm Floridian seas,
                        Assume a massive English air,
                        And close around an English square;
                        While, if I issue from the town,
                        An English hill looks greenly down,
                        Or round me rolls an English park,
                        And in the Broad I hear the Larke!
                        Thus when, where woodland violets hide,
                        I rove with Katie at my side,
                        It scarce would seem amiss to say:
                        "Katie! my home lies far away,
                        Beyond the pathless waste of brine,
                        In a young land of palm and pine!
                        There, by the tropic heats, the soul
                        Is touched as if with living coal,
                        And glows with such a fire as none
                        Can feel beneath a Northern sun,
                        Unless - my Katie's heart attest! -
                        'Tis kindled in an English breast!
                        Such is the land in which I live,
                        And, Katie! such the soul I give.

                        Come! ere another morning beam,
                        We'll cleave the sea with wings of steam;
                        And soon, despite of storm or calm,
                        Beneath my native groves of palm,
                        Kind friends shall greet, with joy and pride,
                        The Southron and his English bride!"

CAROLINA.

I.

II.

                        Cite wealth and science, trade and art,
                        Touch with thy fire the cautious mart,
                        And pour thee through the people's heart,
                        Carolina!
                        Till even the coward spurns his fears,
                        And all thy fields and fens and meres
                        Shall bristle like thy palm with spears,
                        Carolina!

III.

IV.

                        And now it deepens; slow and grand
                        It swells, as, rolling to the land,
                        An ocean broke upon thy strand,
                        Carolina!
                        Shout! let it reach the startled Huns!
                        And roar with all thy festal guns!
                        It is the answer of thy sons,
                        Carolina!

V.

VI.

                        When by thy bier, in mournful throngs
                        The women chant thy mortal wrongs,
                        'Twill be their own funereal songs,
                        Carolina!
                        From thy dead breast by ruffians trod
                        No helpless child shall look to God;
                        All shall be safe beneath thy sod,
                        Carolina!

VII.

A CRY TO ARMS.

                        Ho! woodsmen of the mountain side!
                        Ho! dwellers in the vales!
                        Ho! ye who by the chafing tide
                        Have roughened in the gales!

                        Leave barn and byre, leave kin and cot,
                        Lay by the bloodless spade;
                        Let desk, and case, and counter rot,
                        And burn your books of trade.

                        The despot roves your fairest lands;
                        And till he flies or fears,
                        Your fields must grow but armed bands,
                        Your sheaves be sheaves of spears!
                        Give up to mildew and to rust
                        The useless tools of gain;
                        And feed your country's sacred dust
                        With floods of crimson rain!

                        Come, with the weapons at your call -
                        With musket, pike, or knife;
                        He wields the deadliest blade of all
                        Who lightest holds his life.
                        The arm that drives its unbought blows
                        With all a patriot's scorn,
                        Might brain a tyrant with a rose,
                        Or stab him with a thorn.

                        Does any falter? let him turn
                        To some brave maiden's eyes,
                        And catch the holy fires that burn
                        In those sublunar skies.
                        Oh! could you like your women feel
                        And in their spirit march,
                        A day might see your lines of steel
                        Beneath the victor's arch.

                        What hope, O God! would not grow warm
                        When thoughts like these give cheer?
                        The Lily calmly braves the storm,
                        And shall the Palm-tree fear?
                        No! rather let its branches court
                        The rack that sweeps the plain;
                        And from the Lily's regal port
                        Learn how to breast the strain!

                        Ho! woodsmen of the mountain side!
                        Ho! dwellers in the vales!
                        Ho! ye who by the roaring tide
                        Have roughened in the gales!
                        Come! flocking gayly to the fight,
                        From forest, hill, and lake;
                        We battle for our Country's right,
                        And for the Lily's sake!

SERENADE.

                        Hide, happy damask, from the stars,
                        What sleep enfolds behind your veil,
                        But open to the fairy cars
                        On which the dreams of midnight sail;
                        And let the zephyrs rise and fall
                        About her in the curtained gloom,
                        And then return to tell me all
                        The silken secrets of the room.

                        Ah, dearest! may the elves that sway
                        Thy fancies come from emerald plots,
                        Where they have dozed and dreamed all day
                        In hearts of blue forget-me-nots.
                        And one perhaps shall whisper thus:
                        Awake! and light the darkness, Sweet!
                        While thou art revelling with us,
                        He watches in the lonely street.

WHY SILENT?

                        Why am I silent from year to year?
                        Needs must I sing on these blue March days?
                        What will you say, when I tell you here,
                        That already, I think, for a little praise,
                        I have paid too dear?

                        For, I know not why, when I tell my thought,
                        It seems as though I fling it away;
                        And the charm wherewith a fancy is fraught,
                        When secret, dies with the fleeting lay
                        Into which it is wrought.

                        So my butterfly-dreams their golden wings
                        But seldom unfurl from their chrysalis;
                        And thus I retain my loveliest things,
                        While the world, in its worldliness, does not miss
                        What a poet sings.

TWO PORTRAITS.