Entangled in her golden hair
Some English sunshine, warmth and air.
He straightway entered into the kingdom of Love, and that sunshine
made a radiance over the few years he had left to give to love and
art.
In the city of his home he answered his own "Cry to Arms" when the
"festal guns" roared out their challenge. Had his physique been as
strong as his patriotism, his sword might have rivaled his pen in
reflecting honor upon his beautiful city. Even then the seeds of
consumption had developed, and he was discharged from field service.
Still wishing to remain in the service of his country, he tried the
work of war correspondent, reaching the front just after the battle of
Shiloh. Overcome by the horrors of the retreat, he returned to
Charleston, and was soon after appointed assistant editor of the
_Daily South Carolinian_, published in Columbia. He removed to the
capital, where his prospects became bright enough to permit his
marriage to Kate Goodwin, the English girl to whom his Muse pays such
glowing tribute.
In May, 1864, Simms was in Columbia, and on his return to "Woodlands"
wrote to Hayne that Timrod was in better health and spirits than for
years, saying: "He has only to prepare a couple of dwarf essays,
making a single column, and the pleasant public is satisfied. These he
does so well that they have reason to be so. Briefly, our friend is in
a fair way to fatten and be happy."
This prosperity came to an end when the capital city fell a victim to
the fires of war, and Timrod returned to the city of his birth, where
for a time the publication of the _South Carolinian_ was continued, he
writing editorials nominally for fifteen dollars a month, practically
for exercise in facile expression, as the small stipend promised was
never paid. With the paper, he soon returned to Columbia, where after
a time he secured work in the office of Governor Orr, writing to Hayne
that twice he copied papers from ten o'clock one morning till sunrise
of the next.
With the close of the session, his work ended, and in the spring he
visited Paul Hayne at Copse Hill. Hayne says: "He found me with my
family established in a crazy wooden shanty, dignified as a cottage,
near the track of the main Georgia railroad, about sixteen miles from
Augusta." To Timrod, that "crazy wooden shanty," set in immemorial
pines and made radiant by the presence of his poet friend, was finer
than a palace. On that "windy, frowzy, barren hill," as Maurice
Thompson called it, the two old friends spent together the spring days
of '67--such days as lingered in golden beauty in the memory of one of
them and have come down to us in immortal verse.
Again in August of that year he visited Copse Hill, hoping to find
health among the pines. Of these last days Paul Hayne wrote years
later:
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 hillsides, 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 the depths of reverie, or perhaps of yet
more "charmed 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.
One of those pines was especially his own, by his love and his choice
of its shade as a resting place. Of it Paul Hayne wrote when his
friend had passed from its shadows for the last time:
The same majestic pine is lifted high
Against the twilight sky,
The same low, melancholy music grieves
Amid the topmost leaves,
As when I watched and mused and dreamed with him
Beneath those shadows dim.
Such dreams we can dimly imagine sometimes when we stand beneath a
glorious pine and try to translate its whisperings into words, and
watch "the last rays of sunset shimmering down, flashed like a royal
crown." Sometimes we catch glimpses of such radiant visions when we
stand in the pine shadows and think, as Hayne did so often after that
beautiful August, "Of one who comes no more." Under that stately tree
he
Seemed to drink the sunset like strong wine
Or, hushed in trance divine,
Hailed the first shy and timorous glance from far
Of evening's virgin star.
In all his years after, Paul Hayne held in his heart the picture of
his friend with head against that "mighty trunk" when
The unquiet passion died from out his eyes,
As lightning from stilled skies.
So through that glowing August on Copse Hill the two Southern poets
walked and talked and built their shrine to the shining Olympic
goddess to whom their lives were dedicated.
When summer had wrapped about her the purple and crimson glories of
her brilliant life and drifted into the tomb of past things, Timrod
left the friend of his heart alone with the "soft wind-angels" and
memories of "that quiet eve"
When, deeply, thrillingly,
He spake of lofty hopes which vanquish Death;
And on his mortal breath
A language of immortal meanings hung
That fired his heart and tongue.
[Illustration: HOUSE WHERE TIMROD LIVED DURING HIS LAST YEARS
1108 Henderson Street, Columbia, S.C.]
Impelled by circumstances to leave the pines before their inspiring
breath had given him of their life, he had little strength to renew
the battle for existence, and of the sacrifice of his possessions to
which he had been forced to resort he writes to Hayne: "We have eaten
two silver pitchers, one or two dozen silver forks, several sofas,
innumerable chairs, and a huge bedstead."
We should like to think of life as flowing on serenely in that pretty
cottage on Henderson Street, Columbia, its wide front veranda crowned
with a combed roof supported by a row of white columns. In its cool
dimness we may in fancy see the nature-loving poet at eventide looking
into the greenery of a friendly tree stretching great arms lovingly to
the shadowy porch. A taller tree stands sentinel at the gate, as if to
guard the poet-soul from the world and close it around with the beauty
that it loved.
But life did not bring him any more of joy or success than he had
achieved in the long years of toil and sorrow and disappointment,
brightened by the flame of his own genius throwing upon the dark wall
of existence the pictures that imagination drew with magic hand upon
his sympathetic, ever responsive mind. On the sixth of October, after
that month of iridescent beauty on Copse Hill, came the days of which
he had written long before:
As it purples in the zenith,
As it brightens on the lawn,
There's a hush of death about me,
And a whisper, "He is gone!"
On Copse Hill, "Under the Pine," his lifelong friend stood and
sorrowfully questioned:
O Tree! have not his poet-touch, his dreams
So full of heavenly gleams,
Wrought through the folded dulness of thy bark,
And all thy nature dark
Stirred to slow throbbings, and the fluttering fire
Of faint, unknown desire?
Near the end of his last visit he had told Paul Hayne that he did not
wish to live to be old--"an octogenarian, far less a centenarian,
like old Parr." He hoped that he might stay until he was fifty or
fifty-five; "one hates the idea of a mummy, intellectual or physical."
If those coveted years had been added to his thirty-eight beautiful
ones, a brighter radiance might have crowned our literature. Or, would
the vision have faded away with youth?
On the seventh of October, 1867, Henry Timrod was laid to rest in
Trinity Churchyard, Columbia, beside his little Willie, "the Christmas
gift of God" that brought such divine light to the home only to leave
it in darkness when the gift was recalled before another Christmas
morn had gladdened the world. The poet's grave is marked by a shaft
erected by loving hands, but a memorial more fitting to one who so
loved the beautiful is found in the waving grasses and the fragrant
flowers that Nature spreads for her lover, and the winds of heaven
that breathe soft dirges over his lowly mound.
In Washington Square, Charleston, stands a monument erected in 1901 by
the Timrod Memorial Association of South Carolina to the memory of the
most vivid poet the South has given to the world. On the west panel is
an inscription which expresses to us the mainspring of his character:
Through clouds and through sunshine, in peace and in war, amid
the stress of poverty and the storms of civil strife, his soul
never faltered and his purpose never failed. To his poetic
mission he was faithful to the end. In life and in death he was
"not disobedient unto the Heavenly vision."
On the panel facing the War Monument are three stanzas from his own
beautiful Ode, sung at the decoration of Confederate graves in
Magnolia Cemetery in 1867--such a little time before his passing that
it seems to have mournful, though unconscious, allusion to his own
early fall in the heat of earth's battle:
Sleep sweetly in your humble graves;
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause,
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone.
Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!
The shaft which the prophetic eye of Timrod saw "in the stone" was in
time revealed, and years later that other shaft, awaiting the hour for
doing homage to the poet, found the light. To-day the patriot soldiers
asleep in Magnolia, and their poet alike, have stately testimonials of
the loving memory of their people.
[Note: The quotations from Henry Timrod found in this book are
used by special permission of the B.F. Johnson Publishing Company,
the authorized publishers of Timrod's Poems.]
"FATHER ABBOT"