"Yesterday I had a still more copious hemorrhage!...
"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.
On the 25th of the month 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!
On the 7th 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 skeptical 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."
The poetic creed of Timrod, expressed in his "Vision of Poesy", set
the impress upon all his work. Conscious of his power, he reverently
believed in the mission of the poet as prophet and teacher,--
"The mission of Genius on Earth! To uplift,
Purify, and confirm, by its own gracious gift,
The world,"--
and he has consecrated his gift to its noblest uses in the discharge of
that "high and holy debt".
As lover of man and nature, his sympathy was universal; no theme was too
humble for his pen. "The same law that moulds a planet forms a drop of
dew." "Humility is power!" "We may trace the mighty sun above even by
the shadow of a slender flower." Yet he dealt not with the fleeting;
that was only the passing form of the abiding. Passionately fond as he
was of Nature, and nourished and refreshed by her always, he never wrote
a line of mere descriptive poetry. Nature is only the symbol, the image,
to interpret his spiritual meaning. He felt with Milton, in his noble
words, that the abiding work is not raised in the heat of youth or
the vapors of wine, or by "invocation to dame Memory and her siren
daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich
with all utterance and knowledge, and send out his seraphim with the
hallowed fire of his altars to touch and purify the lips of whom He
pleases."
Under that inspiration and revelation the poet is a divine interpreter
of (in his own words)--
"All lovely things, and gentle--the sweet laugh
Of children, Girlhood's kiss, and Friendship's clasp,
The boy that sporteth with the old man's staff,
The baby, and the breast its fingers grasp--
All that exalts the grounds of happiness,
All griefs that hallow, and all joys that bless,
"To me are sacred; at my holy shrine
Love breathes its latest dreams, its earliest hints;
I turn life's tasteless waters into wine,
And flush them through and through with purple tints.
Wherever Earth is fair, and Heaven looks down,
I rear my altars, and I wear my crown."
It was this mission of Poetry that filled his mind and heart and life
with abiding light, which made him cling passionately to life, not
because of any physical fear of death, but because in that mission Art
and Nature were so inexpressibly rich and sweet to him to reveal his
message to man. In the benediction of his dying words, "Love is sweeter
than rest!"
The moral purity of these poems is their distinctive quality, as it
was of the man. With a universal sympathy for all life, still he moved
always on the highest planes of thought and feeling and purpose. He
seemed always to be impressed in his art with the truth of his own
lines,--
"There is no unimpressive spot on earth,
The beauty of the stars is over all."
His earnestness and deep poetic insight clothed all themes with the
beauty and light that is in and over all.
Timrod's melancholy, the finest test of high poetic quality, when
purified and spiritualized, has no Byronic bitterness, no selfish
morbidness, no impenetrable gloom, but in his own exquisite lines it
is,--
"A shadowy land, where joy and sorrow kiss,
Each still to each corrective and relief,
Where dim delights are brightened into bliss,
And nothing wholly perishes but Grief.
"Ah, me!--not dies--no more than spirit dies;
But in a change like death is clothed with wings;
A serious angel, with entrancèd eyes,
Looking to far off and celestial things."
Again, in all these poems there is a nameless spell of a simplicity,
fervid yet tender, and an imagination, strong yet delicate, both in its
perception and expression.
His style, "like noble music unto noble words," is elaborate, yet
perfectly natural. There is no trace of labor; grace guides and power
impels. So perfect is it at times in its natural power that the mind
is almost unconscious of the word-symbol in grasping immediately the
thought revealed.
There is in the verse a ceaseless melody and perfect finish. At times
there is "the easy elegance of Catullus", always his delight, and a
metrical translation of whose poems he had completed.
Rare endowment with broad culture is evinced in the high intellectual
level always maintained; and the evenness of quality that is always of
the mountain top. He always knows his power, and its range. His song is
always clear and true.
Moreover, with a universality of poetic feeling, he has struck every
chord, and always with a keen sensibility and delicacy of natural
instinct. Among the finest poems, how wide is this range and varied this
power!
"The Vision of Poesy", his longest work, written in youth, essaying the
mission and the philosophy of the poetic art, has some lofty passages,
and all the promise of his later power, felicity, and melody.
"A Year's Courtship" is in its glow, and grace, and music the perfection
of classic art.
The dainty voluptuousness in a "Serenade" kindles with the luxuriousness
of the South.
His "Præceptor Amat" is warm with the breath of rapturous feeling, and
rich with the fragrance of flowers.
"Ethnogenesis", "the birth of the nation", is regarded by some his
greatest poem. It is prophecy linked with the hope and aspiration of the
newborn nation of the South. A permanent image of the Southern nature
and character is thus richly portrayed:--
"But the type
Whereby we shall be known in every land
Is that vast gulf which lips 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."
"The Cotton Boll", in "the snow of Southern summers", is a forerunner
of Lanier's "Corn". It reveals the mystic spell and kingly power of
that far-stretching tropic snow, and contains that glowing painting of
Carolina from sea to mountain, which closes
"No fairer land hath fired a poet's lays,
Or given a home to man!"
"Too Long, O Spirit of Storm", is the fused passion of the poet's heart
appalled at the moral death of stagnation. It has all the intensity and
subtlety of Shelley.
In "The Lily Confidante", delicate and fanciful as it is, the reply
of the Lily "is a simple yet sacred melody", hallowing the purity of
passion.
"The Arctic Voyager" suggests Tennyson's "Ulysses" in its high faith,
lofty purpose, and sustained power.
"Spring" is the burst of the Southern spring, in its flooding life and
glory and beauty. There is "a nameless pathos in the air." A wonderful
revelation is going on before our eyes! No miracle could startle in the
ever new creation, so strange and rapturous is this joy of sense and
spiritual rebirth.
Nor was his genius only reflective, and creative, and playful; his was a
trumpet voice also. When the blast of war sounded, his voice rang like
a clarion in "Carolina" and "Cry to Arms". Beyond their local meaning,
which kindles and thrills, now as then, the men of the South, they have
an abiding, universal power from the standpoint of art; for there is
nothing finer in all the martial strains of the lyric.
Paul Hayne, his brother poet, speaking of "Carolina", as "lines destined
perhaps to outlive the political vitality of the State, whose antique
fame they celebrate," said:--
"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!'"
Profoundly appealing as are Timrod's war strains, for they are the
heart-cry of a people, still it should be noted that there is scarcely a
battle ode that does not close with an invocation to peace, such was the
lofty nature of the poet. War to him was only the drawn sword of right,
and truth, and justice, which accomplished, the prayer for peace was
ever on his lips, as witness the noble invocation to Peace, closing his
"Christmas", that has so often stirred and hushed at once the heart of
the South.
The Ode, written for Memorial Day, April, 1867, of the Confederate
graves at Charleston, was his last production. He had sung in lofty
strains each phase of the struggle, its hope, its courage, its fear,
its despair; he now sings his latest song, a wreath of flowers upon
the unmarked graves of the Southern dead, and has hallowed these sacred
mounds to his people in the words,--
"There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!"
These poems are written in the life-blood of the poet and his
generation. The patriotic fire, the devoted sacrifice and splendid
achievement, that "Carolina", "Cry to Arms", "Unknown Dead", "Carmen
Triumphale", "Charleston", "Storm and Calm", and the other of the war
poems celebrate were not only the rushing tide of earnest feeling of a
noble people then, but are now a part of the glory and heritage of the
State, of the South, and of the American republic. They were the mighty
heart-beats of that great epoch. They are now irrevocable history, and
make these poems a part of the abiding literature of America.
"A Common Thought" is the poet's premonition of his end; but he sees
no vision of the dying glory of sunset, no going out into the dark, no
presentiment of a vague and gloomy voyage on a homeless sea; but in the
sunshine, in the growing light of ever broadening day, amid the joy and
splendor of nature, bright prophecy and intuition of immortality, is to
come the sudden, solemn mystery of the whisper, "He is gone!" And so
it was. For as the sun broadened into glad day, and the full radiance
illumined and animated earth and sea and sky, "as it purpled in the
zenith, as it brightened on the lawn," this rich young life, in its own
fresh morning of genius and spiritual sunshine, passed, and in his own
triumphant words,--
"not dies, no more than Spirit dies;
But in a change like death was clothed with wings."