A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves | Page 2

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