of time. Of all that he has written, nothing is more likely to survive than the ode sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, 1867 Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, In seeds of laurel in the earth The blossom of your fame is blown, Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years, Which keep in trust your storied tombs, And these memorial blooms. Small tributes! but your shades will smile Stoop, angels, hither from the skies! Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned. Timrod's verse gains in value as a product of what may be called, in no invidious sense, local conditions, because at its best it shows little trace of the influence of earlier poets or of schools of poetry. It reveals, by its detachment from the poetic movement here and abroad, a distinct flavor of the soil. There is no touch of the world spirit upon it; its quality is native and individual. The isolation of the Old South on the verge of the Civil War seemed to enclose this sensitive poet, and secure for his gift free development upon the lines of least resistance. The lyrical genius of Paul Hamilton Hayne, his lifelong friend, was less vigorous and concentrated, but more flexible and poten free. Hayne's voice has less carrying power than Timrod's, but he sings with more ease, his interests are wider, and his associations with the masters of his craft are far more intimate and tial in their influence. Timrod's work is characterized by solidity and concreteness; Hayne's work by fluency and grace. The Georgia poet does not strike the ear with such freshness and distinctness of tone; he has wider compass of melody; he suggests greater possibilities of tonal resource; he handles his themes with more assurance and ease. Timrod is more distinctly the product of Southern conditions, and the Southern temperament than Hayne; Hayne betrays more thorough and exacting technical training, and the touch of cosmopolitan influence. Timrod's inspiration is drawn directly from the realities of nature and of experience; Hayne, like many of the Northern poets, fed his imagination at many springs, and refines and modulates his native gift with culture. Circumstances laid a heavy hand on both poets, but Hayne survived the rigors of crushing adversity to live the life of a poet, with as fine a loyalty and as true a dignity as Tennyson, by whose side Fortune stood, not only with the trumpet of Fame at her lips, but with all manner of prosperities in her hands. Like Timrod, the child of a community peculiarly sensitive to the appeals of sentiment and idealism in manners and conduct, Hayne had gentle influences behind him, and entered by inheritance into the best traditions of character and manners. Upon his work, as upon that of Timrod, Lanier, Lowell, Emerson, and Hawthorne, there rests that touch of distinction which is quite as much a quality of nature as of art; for a delicate sense of fitness, of reticence, and of form is the flowering of a fine spirit: it is not to be plucked by an ambitious hand, however audacious and powerful. A strain of high breeding runs through Hayne's whole life and gives it spiritual dignity. The Charleston of 1830, like the Boston of the same year, had a Puritan background, for there were French as well as English Puritans,—a traditional culture, a keen sense of local dignity, and a note of individuality of a very distinct quality. The intellectual inheritance of the Southern city was, however, very different from that of the Northern city; and love of classical literature was its best possession. College opportunities for Hayne, as for Timrod and Lanier, were meagre, so far as range of studies was concerned; but he felt the influence which makes for culture, even if access to it was inadequate. He was not without companionship in the literary aspirations which early disclosed their predominating hold on his interest, not less than upon his imagination. A little company of aspiring young men kept one another in countenance in their most unworldly dreams and their most audacious hopes; and there was unusual promise of literary productiveness in Charleston when the sky began to darken with ominous clouds. When that strange light which often precedes the tempest falls on the landscape, the birds become silent. Hayne's connection with journalism was brief, and its most promising incident was his appointment as editor of "Russell's Magazine," a periodical which, like the "Southern Literary Messenger," at Richmond, was to glean the wide and then unworked field of literature. In 1855, when he was twenty-five years old, his earliest volume of poems was published in Boston, and the cordiality with which it was received,—a cordiality repeated two years later, and a third time after a second interval of three years,-confirmed his determination to make the writing of poetry a vocation. His marriage cannot be passed in silence, however one may shrink from touching the more intimate relationships, because it was a prime fact in his career as a poet. In her slight figure one saw at a glance the indomitable will, the capacity for renunciation, the heroic idealism which made Mrs. Hayne an equal sharer in the self-denials of a lifelong devotion to poetry. It is doubtful if any man ever achieves greatness alone it is certain that Hayne was sustained by a calm and patient faith quite on a level with his own. The war stripped him of all visible links with the past, all tangible ties with his inheritance; his home, his books, his heirlooms of every kind were swept away by the devastating tide. Out of the universal wreck with which half the continent to the Mississippi was strewn, he stepped courageous and resolute, not to rebuild his shattered fortunes, but to live the life of an artist. Heroism was so general throughout the South in those terrible years after the war, when the epical splendor of action had vanished and left only the bitter realities of loss and misery behind, that Hayne's cheerful acceptance of narrow means was in no way exceptional: there was nothing finer, however, in that universal history of privation heroically borne, than his silent renunciation, his cheerful temper, and his steadfast loyalty. The story of those fifteen years at Copse Hill, overlooking Augusta, and within the circle of the whispering pines, is one of those high traditions of the primacy of the spirit in which American history is exceptionally rich, and which, in the long reach of the centuries, may be seen to be the finest contribution made by the earlier American men of letters to higher civilization on this continent. The seclusion at Copse Hill bore no such fruit as did the quiet of Dove Cottage, Allan Bank, and Rydal Mount, in the enchanting atmosphere of the English lakes, where clouds and mountains seem to meet and part in mysterious and magical communings, but it was every whit as dignified. In the simple house, embowered in vines, so rudimentary in form and size that Hayne called it his shanty, he nourished his frail body, and found companionship for his brave spirit in the shade and the voices of the pines. He listened with an ear as sensitive as that with which Emerson heard the murmurings of immemorial branches about Walden Pond, and responded with a readier, though a less penetrating music than the Concord poet. He kept the record of the seasons in his memory, for he gave to meditation the time which most men give to toil; he noted every passing phase of life in the woods, every delicate change, and he interpreted the pine in his emotions as Emerson interpreted it in his mind : Tall, sombre, grim, against the morning sky Tall, sombre, grim, they stand, with dusky gleams A stillness, strange, divine, ineffable, Last sunset comes—the solemn joy and might Till every lock is luminous-gently float, So sings the Southern pine in the ear of a poet whose imagination responds to the vibration of the innumerable needles murmuring or silent, and whose eye misses no aspect, however elusive and evanescent, of the mysterious stir of life in the depths of heart of the trees. In striking contrast is the song of the Northern pine in Emerson's "Wood-Notes":— Heed the old oracles, Ponder my spells; Soundeth the prophetic wind, The shadows shake on the rock behind, And the countless leaves of the pine are strings Hearken! Hearken! If thou wouldst know the mystic song O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells ? O wise man! hear'st thou the least part! |