The Poems Of Henry Timrod Part 2

(half whimpering), 'I'm out of snuff.' A good point in the way of ill.u.s.tration, 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.

"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 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!...

"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 dest.i.tute of funds, almost of food. But G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.ses, 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 n.o.blest 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 pa.s.sing form of the abiding. Pa.s.sionately 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sionately 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 entranced 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 n.o.ble music unto n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sages, 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 cla.s.sic art.

The dainty voluptuousness in a "Serenade" kindles with the luxuriousness of the South.

His "Praeceptor 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 sh.o.r.es 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!"