It has been claimed for James Barron Hope that he was "Virginia's
Laureate." He did not deal in "abstractions, or generalized arguments,"
or vague mysticisms. He fired the imagination purely, he awoke lofty
thoughts and presented, through his noble odes that which is the soul
of "every true poem, a living succession of concrete images and
pictures."
James Barron, the elder, organized the Virginia Colonial Navy, of
which he was commander-in-chief during the Revolution, and his sons,
Samuel and James, served gallantly in the United States Navy. It was
from these ancestors that James Barron Hope derived that unswerving
devotion to his native state for which he was remarkable, and it was
at the residence of his grandfather, Commodore James Barron, the
younger, who then commanded the Gosport Navy-yard, that he was born
the 23d of March, 1829.
His mother, Jane Barron, was the eldest daughter of the Commodore
and most near to his regard. An attractive gentlewoman of the old
school, generous, of quick and lively sympathies, she wielded a
clever, ready pen, and the brush and embroiderer's needle in a
manner not to be scorned in those days, and was a personage in her
family.
Her child was the child not only of her material, but of her
spiritual being, and the two were closely knit as the years passed,
in mutual affection and confidence, in tastes and aspirations.
His father was Wilton Hope of "Bethel," Elizabeth City County, a
handsome, talented man, a landed proprietor, of a family whose acres
bordered the picturesque waters of Hampton River.
He gained his early education at Germantown, Pennsylvania, and at
the "Academy" in Hampton, Virginia, under his venerated master, John
B. Cary, Esq.,--the master who declares himself proud to say,
"I taught him"--the invaluable friend of all his after years.
In 1847 he graduated from William and Mary College with the degree
of A.B.
From the "Pennsylvania," upon which man-of-war he was secretary to
his uncle, Captain Samuel Barron, he was transferred to the
"Cyane," and in 1852 made a cruise to the West Indies.
In 1856 he was elected Commonwealth's attorney to the "game-cock
town of Virginia," historic and picturesque old Hampton, which was
the centre of a charming and cultivated society and which had
already claimed him as her "bard." For as Henry Ellen he had
contributed to various southern publications, his poems in "The
Southern Literary Messenger" attracting much gratifying attention.
In 1857 Lippincott brought out "Leoni di Monota and Other Poems."
The volume was cordially noticed by the southern critics of the time,
not only for its central poem, but also for several of its minor ones,
notably, "The Charge at Balaklava," which G.P.R. James--as have
others since--declared unsurpassed by Tennyson's "Charge of the
Light Brigade."
Upon the 13th of May, 1857, he stood poet at the 250th anniversary
of the English settlement at Jamestown.
As poet, and as the youthful colleague of Henry A. Wise and John R.
Thompson, he stood at the base of Crawford's statue of Washington,
in the Capitol Square, Richmond, Virginia, the 22d of February, 1858.
That same year these recited poems, together with some miscellaneous
ones were published.
Congress chose him as poet for the Yorktown Centennial, 1881, and
his "brilliant and masterly poem was a fitting companion piece to
the splendid oration delivered upon that occasion by the renowned
orator, Robert C. Winthrop."
This metrical address "Arms and the Man," with various sonnets was
published the next year. As the flower of his genius, its noble
measures only revealed their full beauty when they fell from the
lips of him who framed them, and it was under this spell that one of
those who had thronged about him that 19th of October cried out:
"Now I understand the power by which the old Greek poets swayed the
men of their generation."
Again his State called upon him to weave among her annals the
laurels of his verse at the laying of the cornerstone of the
monument erected in Richmond to Robert E. Lee. The corner-stone was
laid October, 1887, but the poet's voice had been stilled forever.
He died September the 15th, as he had often wished to die, "in
harness," and at home, and Death came swift and painless.
His poem, save for the after softening touches, had been finished
the previous day, and was recited at the appointed time and place by
Captain William Gordon McCabe.
"Memoriæ Sacrum," the Lee Memorial Ode, has been pronounced by many
his masterpiece, and waked this noble echo in a brother poet's soul:
'Like those of whom the olden scriptures tell,
Who faltered not, but went on dangerous quest,
For one cool draught of water from the well
With which to cheer their exiled monarch's breast;'
'So thou to add one single laurel more
To our great chieftain's fame--heedless of pain
Didst gather up thy failing strength and pour
Out all thy soul in one last glorious strain.'
* * * * *
"And when the many pilgrims come to gaze
Upon the sculptured form of mighty Lee,
They'll not forget the bard who sang his praise
With dying breath, but deathless melody."
"For on the statue which a country rears,
Tho' graven by no hand, we'll surely see,
E'en tho' it be thro' blinding mists of tears,
Thy name forever linked with that of Lee."
--_Rev. Beverly D. Tucker_.
His genius had flowered not out of opulence, or congenial occupation,
but out of the tread-mill of newspaper life, and under such
conditions from 1870-1887 he delivered the poem at Lynchburg's
celebration of its founding; at the unveiling of the monument raised
to Annie Lee by the ladies of Warren County, North Carolina;
memorial odes in Warrenton, Virginia, in Portsmouth, and Norfolk,
and at the Virginia Military Institute. He was the first commander
of Norfolk's Camp of Confederate Veterans, the Pickett-Buchanan, but
through all his stirring lines there breaks no discordant note of
hate or rancor. He also sent into print, "Little Stories for Little
People," and his novel "Madelon," and delivered among various
masterly addresses, "Virginia--Her Past, Present and Future," and
"The Press and the Printer's Devil."
During these years he had suffered a physical agony well-nigh past
the bearing, but which he bore with a wonderful patience and
fortitude, and not only bore, but hid away from those nearest to him.
He had brought both broken health and fortunes out of the war; for
when in 1861 the people of Hampton left the town,[1] "Its men to
join the Southern army, and its women to go in exile for four long
weary years, returning thence to find their homes in ashes, James
Barron Hope was among the first who left their household gods behind
to take up arms for their native State, and he bore his part nobly
in the great conflict."
When it ended he did not return to Hampton, or to the practice of
his profession. Instead of the law he embarked in journalism in
Norfolk, Virginia, and, despite its lack of entire congeniality,
made therefrom a career as brilliant as it was fearless and unsullied.
[Footnote: A: "They themselves applying the torch to their own homes
under the patriotic, but mistaken idea that they would thus arrest
the march of the Invaders." ("Col. Cary's address at unveiling of
monument to Captain Hope.")]
_Introduction_.
He was a little under six feet in height, slender, graceful, and
finely proportioned, with hands and feet of distinctive beauty. And
his fingers were gifted with a woman's touch in the sick-room, and
an artist's grasp upon the pencil and the brush of the water-colorist.
It was said of him that his manner was as courtly as that of
"Sir Roger de Coverly." Words which though fitly applied are but as
the bare outlines of a picture, for he was the embodiment of what
was best in the Old South. He was gifted with a rare charm. There
was charm in his pale face, which in conversation flashed out of its
deep thoughtfulness into vivid animation. His fine head was crowned
with soft hair fast whitening before its time. His eyes shone under
his broad white forehead, wise and serene, until his dauntless spirit,
or his lofty enthusiasm awoke to fire their grey depths. His was a
face that women trusted and that little children looked up into with
smiles. Those whom he called friend learned the meaning of that name,
and he drew and linked men to him from all ranks and conditions of
life.
Beloved by many, those who guard his memory coin the very fervor of
their hearts into the speech with which they link his name.
"A very Chevalier Bayard" he was called.
Of him was quoted that noble epitaph on the great Lord Fairfax:
'Both sexes' virtues in him combined,
He had the fierceness of the manliest mind,
And all the meekness too of woman kind.'
'He never knew what envy was, nor hate,
His soul was filled with worth and honesty,
And with another thing quite out of date, called modesty.'
No sketch could approach justice toward Captain Hope without at
least a brief review of his domestic life.
In 1857 he had married Miss Annie Beverly Whiting of Hampton. Hers
were the face and form to take captive his poet's fancy, and she
possessed a character as lovely as her person; a courage and
strength of will far out of proportion to her dainty shape, and an
intellect of masculine robustness. Often the editor brought his work
to the table of his library that he might avail himself of his
wife's judgment, and labor with the faces around him that he loved,
for their union was a very congenial one, and when two daughters
came to bless it, as husband and father, he poured out the treasures
of his heart, his mind and soul. To his children he was a wise
teacher, a tender guide, an unfailing friend, the most delightful of
companions. His sympathy for and his understanding of young people
never aged, and he had a circle of dear and familiar friends of
varying ages that gathered about him once a week. There, beside his
own hearth, his ready wit, his kindly humor sparkled most brightly,
and there flowed forth most evenly that speech accounted by many
well worth the hearing. For his was also the art of listening; he
not only led the expression of thought, but inspired it in others.
His own roof-tree looked down upon James Barron Hope at his best and
down upon a home in the sacred sense of the word, for he touched
with poetry the prose of daily living, and left to those who loved
him the blessed legacy of a memory which death cannot take from them.
I have said that in his early years Old Hampton claimed him. He
became the son of the city of his adoption and sleeps among her dead.
Above his ashes rises a shaft, fashioned from the stones of the
State he loved so well which proclaims that it is "The tribute of
his friends offered to the memory of the Poet, Patriot, Scholar, and
Journalist and the Knightly Virginia Gentleman."