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one has read Holmes's "Brother Jonathan's Lament for Sister Caroline" (see page 440). John R. Thompson's "On to Richmond" and "Farewell to Pope" refer to events just as definite as those behind Read's "Sheridan's Ride," or Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie." These recall aspects or phases of the war, events of sometimes national and sometimes individual significance, glimpses of great men, acts of heroism by the common soldiery. Their tone is less lofty than in the lyrics of loyalty, and they are bitter or jaunty, mournful or sublime, as befits the various subjects.

The songs for the soldiers are the most spontaneous fruits of the war, and, as a group, are far better known than other more literary products. "John Brown's Body," "Dixie," "Marching Through Georgia," and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" are known to millions now as they were in war times because spirited words were combined with inspiring tunes. They became folk poetry and experienced the changes both through oral transmission and through deliberate composition of variants to which the most popular songs are often subject. A nobler song, like Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," with which the populace was less inclined to be familiar, came out at the end of the war unscathed from the ordeal by song.

The authorship of the war verses was very widespread. If wars do not often stimulate great literature, they do beyond doubt awaken the sleeping doggerels that more peaceful times leave undisturbed. As parody offers a helping hand to the unoriginal by setting both a metre and a sequence of thought, many of the fireside favorites appeared in this masque of Poesie in every degree of artistic, amusing, and grotesque disguise. Among these were "America," "Dixie," "Excelsior," "The Night Before Christmas," "The Star-Spangled Banner," "The Campbells are Coming," "John Anderson, My Jo," Gray's "Elegy," Hood's "The Song of the Shirt," and even the "Hearts of Oak," which had done valiant service in the War of the Revolution. In this secondary zone of martial verse, however, there is almost nothing worth preserving which was not composed by authors who had at least sectional reputations. The freshest note from those who would otherwise be generally forgotten was struck by two Southerners, John R. Thompson, author of "On to Richmond" and "Farewell to Pope,' and Albert B. Pike, author of the best of many versions of Dixie. Thompson's work is excellent jovial satire. He has an easy mastery of verse, control of double and multiple rhymes, which are always effective in lighter moods, a pungent humor, and an abounding and infectious jollity. When at his best in this vein he challenges comparison with Lowell.

On the whole, with reference to all of this verse, whether written by the most or the least eminent, we are driven to the admission that the dust and smoke of battle are suffocating to the Muse. The poets who can soar on Pegasus are rather awkward on Bucephalus, and the lesser ones who belong with the infantry are unimpressive spectacles on any sort of steed.

HENRY TIMROD (1829-1867)

Timrod was born in Charleston, S. C., December 8, 1829. His grandfather was a soldier in the War of the Revolution, and his father, a man of literary tastes, contracted a fatal illness in the Seminole engagements of 1836. The boy was a schoolmate of Basil L. Gildersleeve and Paul Hamilton Hayne. For two years, apparently from 1847 to 1849, he was enrolled in the University of Georgia, though the period was chiefly marked by the writing of adolescent love songs for the Charleston Evening News and by a series of contributions to the Southern Literary Messenger over the pen-name of Agläus, which he used till 1853. In the meantime, he had gone into and out of a law office, and had started a ten-year career as a teacher, first as an assistant in a private school, and then as tutor in two families. In 1859 his first book of poems was published, by Ticknor & Fields, in Boston. The volume, containing thirteen sonnets and thirty longer pieces, was cordially commended by the critics.

During the Civil War, he was actively writing-as correspondent for the Charleston Mercury, as associate editor of the South Carolinian, and as author of inspiring songs for the Confederacy. With Sherman's march to the sea he was reduced to utter poverty, from which he never recovered before his death from a series of hemorrhages in 1867.

I. Editions.

Timrod's poems have appeared as follows: In Boston, 1860; in New York, edited by P. H. Hayne, 1872 and 1873; in Boston, the edition under the auspices of the Timrod Memorial Association, 1899, and the same in Richmond, 1901.

II. Biography and Criticism.

Memoir prefixed to editions of 1899 and 1901; Sketch with edition of 1873 by P. H. Hayne; Henry Timrod, Laureate of the Confederacy, G. A. Wauchope, North Carolina Review, May 5, 1912; Dr. Frank Ticknor and Henry Timrod, S. A. Link, published by the Methodist Episcopal Church Society; in Holy Grail, six addresses, J. A. B. Scherer, 1905; introduction to selections in Library of Southern Literature.

Timrod is one of the several American poets of genuine achievement who died before middle life, and, of these, one of the men who had progressed the fastest and showed the largest relative promise. As a boy and growing man, it is clear in the record of his life, as well as in his verses, that he was an extravagant and self-indulgent sentimentalist. He went through all the emotional ebullitions of normal youth, but he went through them with abnormal intensity, and he was complacently self-conscious of what he was doing. He recorded with pride his susceptibility to spring, to roses, to babies and older children, to night, to the mocking-bird, and to a steady succession of inamoratas. Emotion was an end in itself. Few poets have ever so celebrated the praises of what Jane Austen called sensi

bility. In fact, this 18th century term gives the cue not only to Timrod's earlier career but to certain prevailing Southern traits. Whatever the origin of Southern speech and manners, they did-and still do in some measure resemble those which we associate with the generations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Laurence Sterne. Both are marked by a somewhat elevated formality of phrasing-much of it conventionalized-an inclination to forensics, a vocal insistence upon honor and chivalry, an opulent show of deference to beauty and to woman; and both at times topple on the verge of that histrionic insincerity which follows hard on the heel of any traditionalized forms of speech. Such habits of thought and expression became what is called "second nature" to the youthful Timrod, and, although in the best of his mature writing he overcame them by summoning his self-conscious "first nature" to the fore, they reasserted themselves during his last illness, and have unhappily been printed and reprinted by the admiring recorders of his dying hours.

Yet even in Timrod's earliest volume there is poem after poem to show that the white flame of real creative fervor could burn away the flimsy covering of decorative verbiage whenever he became more concerned with his subject than with self-analysis or self-display. To be sure, much of it is imitative of Tennyson at his feeblest; much is utterly commonplace. He makes the morning stars sing together, turns water into wine, and asserts that truth is beauty as gravely as though it had never been said before. But in the same poem that is beclogged with passionate lyres, bleeding patriots, and azure heights, he likens the poet's words to "bright cataracts that front a sunrise," and in such flashes preludes the dawn of his maturer powers. The whole sonnet, "I know not why, but all this weary day" (p. 348), points the fine distinction between sentiment and sentimentalism, and in its premonitory despair is as poignant as Rossetti's "Sea Limits," which it preceded by several years:

Now it has been a vessel losing way,
Rounding a stormy headland; now a gray
Dull waste of clouds above a wintry main;
And then, a banner, drooping in the rain,
And meadows beaten into bloody clay.

With the outbreak of the war, the feminine strain in Timrod asserted itself in the heroic endurance and self-restraint that more propitious circumstances might never have developed. All through it he was singularly free from the abusive rancour that always rises as a shrill obligato in the times that try men's souls. Of course, he felt deep conviction, but he expressed it in honest passion, and, except for rare and momentary outbursts, never in hate.

"Ethnogenesis," the birth of a nation, is naturally not a love poem addressed to the North, and the middle sections are unfriendly and uncharitable, as vulnerable in these respects as a great deal of Lowell's and Whittier's verse written in wartime. But the vital fact about this ode is a positive one, that with ardent faith it celebrates-especially in the analogy on the benevolent influence of the Gulf Stream-the aspirations of the Confederacy. "Carolina" starts with "despots" and ends with "Huns" -how limited and outworn is the language of national abuse!—but it is

a real and stirring call to arms, as generous as such appeals may be. "Charleston" is utterly unsullied by any emotion lower than fine and solemn resolution. "Christmas" is a lovely song of hope for peace. Considered thus, bit by bit, and more strikingly still, when considered in the light of 20th century war poetry, what Timrod wrote in the heat of the conflict is remarkably magnanimous. If he had never shown anger in a single line the total effect would have been rather flabby, as the utterance of a man who did not lose his temper because he had none to control; but Timrod blazed out just often enough to prove that he was genuinely large-hearted in his self-restraint.

The inevitable fact is that the immediate effect of war upon the arts is a blighting one. It is the one conclusion to be drawn from the works of any poet who has also written in times of peace, and it is a conclusion to be derived even from Timrod's best known poem. The theme of the poem is a noble one, and has been frequently attempted. It is that the work of the farmer is the strengthening of the sinews of the world. Timrod felt this as Lanier was to see it a little later, and as Bryant had already done; and with a cotton boll in his hand he found in it a spell that unfolded before him a vista as broad as the world-a world in which he visioned an idealized commerce that "only bounds its blessings by mankind." But now in this fine mood of optimism the grim fact of war intruded on his calm as he weaved his woof of song, and in a moment, in spite of every effort to keep himself in hand, he was berating the "Goth" even while resolving to be merciful to him. The poet who always keeps his balance in wartimes must be either superhuman or subhuman. Personal hardship Timrod endured without flinching. In the face of the ghastly devastation wrought by Sherman's army, the scars of which are still to be seen, he had no word except one of hope for the reconstruction which he did not live to behold:

A time of peaceful prayer,

Of law, love, labor, honest loss and gain-
These are the visions of the coming reign
Now floating to them on this wintry air.

Timrod, Lanier and Poe each lived less than forty years, and Timrod slightly less than either of the others. Of the three, all ill-fated, his lot was perhaps the hardest and his development was less complete; but in his poetry he came to closer grips with life than they. The worlds of the other two were more subjective, and their interest in art was vastly more involved in problems of technique; so much so, that the reader often forgets what they are saying in his attention to the way in which they are expressing it. But Timrod, who in his youth was lamentably imitative and self-conscious, was redeemed as an artist in the ordeal by battle, and in his later work spoke simply and truly as one who was talking in his native idiom.

PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE (1830-1886)

Hayne was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on New Year's Day, 1830. He was a student in Charleston College, and grew up under the influence of his distinguished uncle, Robert Y. Hayne, remembered as the objective of Webster's "Reply," and as Senator for and Governor of his State. Before the opening of the Civil War, he published volumes of poems in 1855, 1857, and 1859, and in 1857 he became editor of the choice but short-lived Russell's Magazine. He was not strong enough for actual field service in the war, but was for a while a member of the Governor's staff. After the destruction of his home and library, he removed with his wife to "Copse Hill," Georgia, where he lived in rather splendid poverty till the end of his life. His writing brought him in a bare subsistence, but he would not submit to any other form of money-getting. He wrote abundantly for the periodicals, and brought out the following volumes: "Legends and Lyrics," 1872; edition of Timrod's poems, with introduction, 1873; "The Mountain of the Lovers and Other Poems," 1875; lives of Robert Y. Hayne and Hugh S. Legare, 1878, and Complete Poems, 1882. I. Texts.

Complete Edition (his own selection), 1882, with biographical sketch by Margaret Preston.

II. Biographical and Criticism.

There is no adequate biography of Hayne. The introduction to the selections in the Library of Southern Literature is well supplemented by his own reminiscences in the same volume reprinted from The Southern Bivouac. See also Paul Hamilton Hayne, S. A. Link,· Pub. M. E. Ch. Soc., and the passages in the survey histories.

Paul Hamilton Hayne was a long way from being a great poet or a great man; yet in a secondary way he is significant as a real representative of a period and a locality. A man cannot be egregious without having a grex or flock-from which to emerge, and in the Charleston of of Hayne's day there was a genuine literary flock. The chief of the clan was William Gilmore Simms, the most picturesque and vigorous of them all, as well as longest lived and the most prolific-a South Carolina combination of Dr. Johnson and Anthony Trollope, with a dash of G. P. R. James thrown in. Around him and John Russell, the bookseller, there rallied a group who were to Charleston what the frequenters of the Old Corner Book Store were to Boston, or the daily visitors to Putnam's offices were to New York.

We have Hayne's own description of the old city and the bookish people in it in a series of articles to the Southern Bivouac in the autumn of 1885, just before his death.

In a city which cared more for the art of living than for getting and spending, John Russell-a man of sufficient presence to have once been mistaken on a channel steamer for the English Prime Minister-made

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