A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves

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James Barron Hope
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Title: A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves
Author: James Barron Hope
Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9653]
[This file was first
posted on October 13, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A WREATH

OF VIRGINIA BAY LEAVES ***
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A WREATH OF VIRGINIA BAY LEAVES.
POEMS OF JAMES BARRON HOPE.
JANEY HOPE MARR (EDITOR)
To the memory of the gallant little lad who bore his grandfather's name
and image--to the dear remembrance of:
Barron Hope Marr
His mother dedicates whatsoever there may be of worth in her effort to
show James Barron Hope, the Poet, as Virginia's Laureate, and James
Barron Hope, the Man, as he was loved and reverenced by his
household and his friends.
INTRODUCTION.
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