The Poems of Henry Timrod | Page 8

her message to his stricken people. It is so true and prophetic that we quote the words written in April, 1866.
"For Spring is a true Reconstructionist, -- a reconstructionist in the best and most practical sense. There is not a nook in the land in which she is not at this moment exerting her influence in preparing a way for the restoration of the South. No politician may oppose her; her power defies embarrassment; but she is not altogether independent of help. She brings us balmy airs and gentle dews, golden suns and silver rains; and she says to us, `These are the materials of the only work in which you need be at present concerned; avail yourselves of them to reclothe your naked country and feed your impoverished people, and you will find that, in the discharge of that task,?you have taken the course which will most certainly and most peacefully conduct you to the position which you desire. Turn not aside to bandy epithets with your enemies; stuff your ears, like the princess in the Arabian Nights, against words of insult and wrong;?pause not to muse over your condition, or to question your prospects; but toil on bravely, silently, surely. . . .'
"Such are the words of wise and kindly counsel, which, if we attend rightly, we may all hear in the winds and read in the skies of Spring. Nowhere, however, does she speak with so eloquent a voice or so pathetic an effect as in this ruined town. She covers our devastated courts?with images of renovation in the shape of flowers; she hangs once more in our blasted gardens the fragrant lamps of the jessamine; in our streets she kindles the maple like a beacon; and from amidst the charred and blackened ruins of once happy homes she pours, through the mouth of her favorite musician, the mocking-bird, a song of hope and joy. What is the lesson which she designs by these means to convey? It may be summed in a single sentence, -- forgetfulness of the past, effort in the present, and trust for the future."
Such was the lofty creed and last hopeful, but dying message to his brothers of the South, whose war songs he had written, and the requiem of whose martyred hosts he had chanted.
Such was the tragedy that ended in October, 1867, with the hero at the age of thirty-seven; glory, genius, anguish, tears,?but unconquerable faith and heroic fortitude. His larger life scarce begun, his full power felt, but only half expressed, he realized deeply --
"The petty done, the vast undone!"
He yearned with passionate longing and hope and conscious might to fulfill an even greater mission; but in the infinite providence of God the full fruitage of this exquisite soul was for another sphere. He was indeed "one of those who stirred us, a friend of man and a lover. In no country of this earth could he long have been an alien, and that may now be said of his spirit. In no part of this universe could it feel lonely or unbefriended; it was in harmony with all that flowers or gives perfume in life."
The story of his last days, as given by his poet-friend, Paul Hayne, at the latter's cottage among the pines, is of tender and peculiar interest, and we quote it here, as it was written in 1873: --
==?. . . In the latter summer-tide of this same year (1867),?I again persuaded him to visit me. Ah! how sacred now, how sad and sweet, are the memories of that rich, clear, prodigal August of '67!
We would rest on the hillsides, in the swaying golden shadows, watching together the Titanic masses of snow-white clouds?which floated slowly and vaguely through the sky, suggesting by their form, whiteness, and serene motion, despite the season, flotillas of icebergs upon Arctic seas. Like Lazzaroni we basked in the quiet noons, sunk into the depths of reverie, or perhaps of yet more "charmed sleep". Or we smoked, conversing lazily between the puffs,
"Next to some pine whose antique roots just peeped?From out the crumbling bases of the sand."
But the evenings, with their gorgeous sunsets "rolling down like a chorus" and the "gray-eyed melancholy gloaming", were the favorite?hours of the day with him. He would often apostrophize twilight in the language of Wordsworth's sonnet: --
"Hail, twilight! sovereign of one peaceful hour!?Not dull art thou as undiscerning night;?But only studious to remove from sight
Day's mutable distinctions."
"Yes," said he, "she is indeed sovereign of ONE PEACEFUL HOUR! In the hardest, busiest time one feels the calm, merciful-minded queen stealing upon one in the fading light, and `whispering', as Ford has it (or is it Fletcher?), -- `WHISPERING tranquillity'."
When in-doors and disposed to read, he took much pleasure?in perusing the poems of Robert Buchanan and Miss