Poets of the South Part 5

"And ever since that immemorial hour When the glad morning stars together sung, My task hath been, beneath a mightier Power, To keep the world forever fresh and young; I give it not its fruitage and its green, But clothe it with a glory all unseen."

And what are the objects on which this angel of Poesy loves to dwell?

Truth, freedom, pa.s.sion, she answers, and--

"All lovely things, and gentle--the sweet laugh Of children, girlhood's kiss, and friends.h.i.+p's clasp, The boy that sporteth with the old man's staff, The baby, and the breast its fingers grasp-- All that exalts the grounds of happiness, All griefs that hallow, and all joys that bless,

"To me are sacred; at my holy shrine Love breathes its latest dreams, its earliest hints; I turn life's tasteless waters into wine, And flush them through and through with purple tints.

Wherever earth is fair, and heaven looks down, I rear my altars, and I wear my crown."

Many of the poems in this first volume are worthy of note, as revealing some phase of the poet's versatile gifts--delicate fancy, simplicity and truth, lucid force, or finished art. _The Lily Confidante_, is a light, lilting fancy, the moral of which is:--

"Love's the lover's only magic, Truth the very subtlest art; Love that feigns, and lips that flatter, Win no modest heart."

_The Past_ was first published in the _Southern Literary Messenger_, and afterwards went the rounds of the press. It teaches the important truth that we are the sum of all we have lived through. The past forms the atmosphere which we breathe today; it is--

"A shadowy land, where joy and sorrow kiss, Each still to each corrective and relief, Where dim delights are brightened into bliss, And nothing wholly perishes but grief.

"Ah me!--not dies--no more than spirit dies; But in a change like death is clothed with wings; A serious angel, with entranced eyes, Looking to far-off and celestial things."

Timrod possessed an ardent spirit that was stirred to its depths by the Civil War. His martial songs, with their fierce intensity, better voiced the feelings of the South at that time than those of Hayne or any other Southern singer. In his _Ethnogenesis_--the birth of a nation--he celebrates in a lofty strain the rise of the Confederacy, of which he cherished large and generous hopes:--

"The type Whereby we shall be known in every land Is that vast gulf which lips our Southern strand, And through the cold, untempered ocean pours Its genial streams, that far off Arctic sh.o.r.es May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze Strange tropic warmth and hints of summer seas."

But his most stirring lyrics are _Carolina_ and _A Cry to Arms_, which in the exciting days of '61 deeply moved the Southern heart, but which today serve as melancholy mementos of a long-past sectional bitterness. Of the vigorous lines of the former, Hayne says in an interesting autobiographic touch, "I read them first, and was thrilled by their power and pathos, upon a stormy March evening in Fort Sumter!

Walking along the battlements, under the red lights of a tempestuous sunset, the wind steadily and loudly blowing from off the bar across the tossing and moaning waste of waters, driven inland; with scores of gulls and white sea-birds flying and shrieking round me,--those wild voices of Nature mingled strangely with the rhythmic roll and beat of the poet's impa.s.sioned music. The very spirit, or dark genius, of the troubled scene appeared to take up, and to repeat such verses as:--

"'I hear a murmur as of waves That grope their way through sunless caves, Like bodies struggling in their graves, Carolina!

"'And now it deepens; slow and grand It swells, as rolling to the land, An ocean broke upon the strand, Carolina!'"

These impa.s.sioned war lyrics brought the poet speedy popularity. For a time his hopes were lifted up to a roseate future. In 1862 some of his influential friends formed the project of bringing out a handsome edition of his poems in London. The war correspondent of the _London Ill.u.s.trated News_, himself an artist, volunteered to furnish original ill.u.s.trations. The scheme, at which the poet was elated, promised at once bread and fame. But, as in so many other instances, he was doomed to bitter disappointment. The increasing stress of the great conflict absorbed the energies of the South; and the promising plan, notwithstanding the poet's popularity, was buried beneath the noise and tumult of battle.

Disqualified by feeble health from serving in the ranks, Timrod, shortly after the battle of s.h.i.+loh, went to Tennessee as the war correspondent of the _Charleston Mercury_. To his retiring and sympathetic nature the scenes of war were painful. "One can scarcely conceive," says Dr. Bruns, "of a situation more hopelessly wretched than that of a mere child in the world's ways suddenly flung down into the heart of that strong retreat, and tossed like a straw on the crest of those refluent waves, from which he escaped as by a miracle."

In 1863 he went to Columbia as a.s.sociate editor of the _South Carolinian_. He was scarcely less happy and vigorous in prose than in verse. A period of prosperity seemed at last to be dawning; and, in the cheerful prospect, he ventured to marry Miss Kate Goodwin of Charleston, "Katie, the fair Saxon," whom he had long loved and of whom he had sung in one of his longest and sweetest poems. But his happiness was of brief duration. In a twelvemonth the army of General Sherman entered Columbia, demolished his office, and sent him adrift as a helpless fugitive.

The close of the war found him a ruined man; he was almost dest.i.tute of property and broken in health. He was obliged to sell some of his household furniture to keep his family in bread. "We have," he says, in a sadly playful letter to Hayne at this period, "we have--let me see!--yes, we have eaten two silver pitchers, one or two dozen silver forks, several sofas, innumerable chairs, and a huge--bedstead!" He could find no paying market for his poems in the impoverished South; and in the North political feeling was still too strong to give him access to the magazines there. The only employment he could find was some clerical work for a season in the governor's office, where he sometimes toiled far beyond his strength. In this time of discouragement and need, the gloom of which was never lifted, he pathetically wrote to Hayne: "I would consign every line of my verse to eternal oblivion for _one hundred dollars in hand_."

In 1867 his physicians recommended a change of air; and accordingly he spent a month with his lifelong friend Hayne at Copse Hill. It was the one rift in the clouds before the fall of night. There is a pathetic beauty in the fellows.h.i.+p of the two poets during these brief weeks, when, with spirits often attuned to high thought and feeling, they roamed together among the pines or sat beneath the stars. "We would rest on the hillsides," says Hayne, "in the swaying golden shadows, watching together the t.i.tanic ma.s.ses 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 in 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.'"

Timrod survived but a few weeks after his return to Columbia. The circ.u.mstances of his death were most pathetic. Though sustained by Christian hopes, he still longed to live a season with the dear ones about him. When, after a period of intense agony that preceded his dissolution, his sister murmured to him, "You will soon be at rest _now_," he replied, with touching pathos, "Yes, my sister, _but love is sweeter than rest_." He died October 7, 1867, and was laid to rest in Trinity churchyard, where his grave long remained unmarked.

Two princ.i.p.al editions of his works have been published: the first in 1873, with an admirable memoir by Hayne; the second in 1899, under the auspices of the Timrod Memorial a.s.sociation of South Carolina. A number of his poems and his prose writings still remain uncollected; and there is yet no biography that fully records the story of his life. This fact is not a credit to Southern letters, for, as we have seen, Timrod was a poet of more than commonplace ability and achievement.

For the most part, his themes were drawn from the ordinary scenes and incidents of life. He was not ambitious of lofty subjects, remote from the hearts and homes of men. He placed sincerity above grandeur; he preferred love to admiration. He was always pure, brave, and true; and, as he sang:--

"The brightest stars are nearest to the earth, And we may track the mighty sun above, Even by the shadow of a slender flower.

Always, O bard, humility is power!

And thou mayest draw from matters of the hearth Truths wide as nations, and as deep as love."

CHAPTER V

SIDNEY LANIER

Lanier's genius was predominantly musical. He descended from a musical ancestry, which included in its line a "master of the king's music" at the court of James I. His musical gifts manifested themselves in early childhood. Without further instruction in music than a knowledge of the notes, which he learned from his mother, he was able to play, almost by intuition, the flute, guitar, violin, piano, and organ. He organized his boyish playmates into an amateur minstrel band; and when in early manhood he began to confide his most intimate thoughts to a notebook, he wrote, "The prime inclination--that is, natural bent (which I have checked, though)--of my nature is to music, and for that I have the greatest talent; indeed, not boasting, for G.o.d gave it me, I have an extraordinary musical talent, and feel it within me plainly that I could rise as high as any composer."

This early bent and pa.s.sion for music never left him. His thought continually turned to the subject of music, and in the silences of his soul he frequently heard wonderful melodies. In his novel, _Tiger Lilies_, he lauds music in a rapturous strain: "Since in all holy wors.h.i.+p, in all conditions of life, in all domestic, social, religious, political, and lonely individual doings; in all pa.s.sions, in all countries, earthly or heavenly; in all stages of civilization, of time, or of eternity; since, I say, in all these, music is always present to utter the shallowest or the deepest thoughts of man or spirit--let us cease to call music a fine art, to cla.s.s it with delicate pastry cookery and confectionery, and to fear to make too much of it lest it should make us sick." At a later period, while seeking to regain his health by a sojourn in Texas, he wrote to his wife: "All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great s.p.a.ce of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody. The very inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs, bird-songs, pa.s.sion-songs, folk-songs, country-songs, s.e.x-songs, soul-songs, and body-songs, hath blown upon me in quick gusts like the breath of pa.s.sion, and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams, whereof each wave is at once a vision and a melody."

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIDNEY LANIER.]

This predominance of music in the genius of Lanier is at once the source of his strength and of his weakness in poetry. In his poems, and in his work ent.i.tled _The Science of English Verse_, it is the musical element of poetry upon which the princ.i.p.al emphasis is laid. This fact makes him the successor of Poe in American letters. Both in theory and in practice Lanier has, as we shall see, achieved admirable results. But, after all, the musical element of poetry is of minor importance. It is a means, and not an end. No jingle of sound can replace the delicacy of fancy, n.o.bleness of sentiment and energy of thought that const.i.tute what we may call the soul of poetry. Rhapsody is not the highest form of poetic achievement. In its n.o.blest forms poetry is the medium through which great souls, like Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, give to the world, with cla.s.sic self-restraint, the fruitage of their highest thought and emotion.

The life of Lanier was a tragedy. While lighted here and there with a fleeting joy, its prevailing tone was one of sadness. The heroic courage with which he met disease and poverty impart to his life an inspiring grandeur. He was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. His sensitive spirit early responded to the beauties of Nature; and in his hunting and fis.h.i.+ng trips, in which he was usually accompanied by his younger brother Clifford, he caught something of the varied beauties of marsh, wood, and sky, which were afterwards to be so admirably woven into his poems. He early showed a fondness for books, and in the well-stored shelves of his father's library he found ample opportunity to gratify his taste for reading. His literary tastes were doubtless formed on the old English cla.s.sics--Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Addison--which formed a part of every Southern gentleman's library.

At the age of fifteen he entered the Soph.o.m.ore cla.s.s of Oglethorpe College, near Milledgeville, an inst.i.tution that did not have sufficient vitality to survive the Civil War. He did not think very highly of the course of instruction, and found his chief delight, as perhaps the best part of his culture, in the congenial circle of friends he gathered around him. The evenings he spent with them were frequently devoted to literature and music. A cla.s.smate, Mr. T. F. Newell, gives us a vivid picture of these social features of his college life. "I can recall," he says, "my a.s.sociation with him with sweetest pleasure, especially those Attic nights, for they are among the dearest and tenderest recollections of my life, when with a few chosen companions we would read from some treasured volume, it may have been Tennyson, or Carlyle, or Christopher North's _Noctes Ambrosianoe_, or we would make the hours vocal with music and song; those happy nights, which were veritable refections of the G.o.ds, and which will be remembered with no other regret than that they will nevermore return. On such occasions I have seen him walk up and down the room and with his flute extemporize the sweetest music ever vouchsafed to mortal ear. At such times it would seem as if his soul were in a trance, and could only find existence, expression, in the ecstasy of tone, that would catch our souls with his into the very seventh heaven of harmony."

Lanier was a diligent student, and easily stood among the first of his cla.s.ses, particularly in mathematics. His reading took a wide range. In addition to the leading authors of the nineteenth century, he showed a fondness for what was old and quaint in our literature. He delighted in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ and in the works of "the poet- preacher," Jeremy Taylor. At this time, too, his thoughtful nature turned to the serious problem of his life work. He eagerly questioned his capabilities as preliminary, to use his own words, "to ascertaining G.o.d's will with reference to himself." As already learned from his notebook, he early recognized his extraordinary gifts in music. But his ambition aimed at more than a musician's career, for it seemed to him, as he said, that there were greater things that he might do.

His ability and scholars.h.i.+p made a favorable impression on the college authorities, and immediately after his graduation he was elected to a tutors.h.i.+p. From this position, so congenial to his scholarly tastes, he was called, after six months, by the outbreak of the Civil War. In his boyhood he had shown a martial spirit. With his younger brother he joined the Macon Volunteers, and soon saw heavy service in Virginia. He took part in the battles of Seven Pines, Drewry's Bluffs, and Malvern Hill, in all of which he displayed a chivalrous courage. Afterward he became a signal officer and scout. "Nearly two years," he says, in speaking of this part of his service, "were pa.s.sed in skirmishes, racing to escape the enemy's gunboats, signaling dispatches, serenading country beauties, poring over chance books, and foraging for provender." In 1864 he became a blockade runner, and in his first run out from near Fort Fisher, he was captured and taken to Point Lookout prison.

It is remarkable that, amid the distractions and hards.h.i.+ps of active service, his love of music and letters triumphantly a.s.serted itself. His flute was his constant companion. He utilized the brief intervals of repose that came to him in camp to set some of Tennyson's songs to music and to prosecute new lines of literary study. He took up the study of German, in which he became quite proficient, and by the light of the camp fire at night translated from Heine, Schiller, and Goethe. At the same time his sympathy with the varied aspects of Nature was deepened. Trees and flowers and ferns revealed to him their mystic beauty; and like Wordsworth, he found it easy, "in the lily, the sunset, the mountain, and rosy hues of all life, to trace G.o.d."

It was during his campaigns in Virginia that he began the composition of his only novel, _Tiger Lilies_, which was not completed, however, till 1867. It is now out of print. Though immature and somewhat chaotic, it clearly reveals the imaginative temperament of the author. War is imaged to his mind as "a strange, enormous, terrible flower," which he wishes might be eradicated forever and ever. As might be expected, music finds an honored place in its pages. He regards music as essential to the home. "Given the raw materials," he says, "to wit, wife, children, a friend or two, and a house,--two other things are necessary. These are a good fire and good music. And inasmuch as we can do without the fire for half the year, I may say that music is the one essential. After the evening spent around the piano, or the flute, or the violin, how warm and how chastened is the kiss with which the family all say good night! Ah, the music has taken all the day cares and thrown them into its terrible alembic and boiled them and rocked them and cooled them, till they are crystallized into one care, which is a most sweet and rare desirable sorrow--the yearning for G.o.d."

After the war came a rude struggle for existence--a struggle in which tuberculosis, contracted during his camp life, gradually sapped his strength. Hemorrhages became not infrequent, and he was driven from one locality to another in a vain search for health. But he never lost hope; and his sufferings served to bring out his indomitable, heroic spirit, and to stimulate him to the highest degree of intellectual activity. Few men have accomplished more when so heavily handicapped by disease and poverty. The record of his struggle is truly pathetic. In a letter to Paul Hamilton Hayne, written in 1880, he gives us a glimpse both of his physical suffering and his mental agony. "I could never tell you," he says, "the extremity of illness, of poverty, and of unceasing toil, in which I have spent the last three years, and you would need only once to see the weariness with which I crawl to bed after a long day's work, and after a long night's work at the heels of it--and Sundays just as well as other days--in order to find in your heart a full warrant for my silence.

It seems incredible that I have printed such an unchristian quant.i.ty of matter--all, too, tolerably successful--and secured so little money; and the wife and the four boys, who are so lovely that I would not think a palace good enough for them if I had it, make one's earnings seem all the less." During all these years of toil he longed to be delivered from the hard struggle for bread that he might give himself more fully to music and poetry.

In 1867, while in charge of a prosperous school at Prattville, Alabama, he married Miss Mary Day, of Macon, Georgia. It proved a union in which Lanier found perpetual inspiration and comfort. His new-found strength and happiness are reflected in more than one of his poems. In _Acknowledgment_ we read:--

"By the more height of thy sweet stature grown, Twice-eyed with thy gray vision set in mine, I ken far lands to wifeless men unknown, I compa.s.s stars for one-s.e.xed eyes too fine."

And in _My Springs_, he says again, with great beauty:--

"Dear eyes, dear eyes and rare complete-- Being heavenly-sweet and earthly-sweet-- I marvel that G.o.d made you mine, For when He frowns, 'tis then ye s.h.i.+ne!"

In 1873, after giving up the study of law in his father's office, he went to Baltimore, where he was engaged as first flute for the Peabody Symphony concerts. This engagement was a bold undertaking, which cannot be better presented than in his own words. In a letter to Hayne he says: "Aside from the complete _boulevers.e.m.e.nt_ of proceeding from the courthouse to the footlights, I was a raw player and a provincial withal, without practice, and guiltless of instruction--for I had never had a teacher. To go under these circ.u.mstances among old professional players, and a.s.sume a leading part in a large orchestra which was organized expressly to play the most difficult works of the great masters, was (now that it's all over) a piece of temerity that I don't remember ever to have equaled before. But I trusted in love, pure and simple, and was not disappointed; for, as if by miracle, difficulties and discouragements melted away before the fire of a pa.s.sion for music which grows ever stronger within my heart; and I came out with results more gratifying than it is becoming in me to specify." His playing possessed an exquisite charm. "In his hands the flute," to quote from the tribute paid him by his director, "no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration. Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry; they were not only true and pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were, suggestive of the depths and heights of being and of the delights which the earthly ear never hears and the earthly eye never sees."

Henceforth Baltimore was to be Lanier's home. In addition to music, he gave himself seriously to literature. Before this period he had written a number of poems, limited in range and somewhat labored in manner. The current of his life still set to music, and his poetic efforts seem to have been less a matter of inspiration than of deliberate choice. In literary form the influence of Poe is discernible; but in subject-matter the sounds and colors of Nature, as in the poetry of his later years, occupy a prominent place. Of the poems of this early period the songs for _The Jacquerie_ are the best. Here is a stanza of _Betrayal_:--

"The sun has kissed the violet sea, And burned the violet to a rose.

O sea! wouldst thou not better be More violet still? Who knows? Who knows?

Well hides the violet in the wood: The dead leaf wrinkles her a hood, And winter's ill is violet's good; But the bold glory of the rose, It quickly comes and quickly goes-- Red petals whirling in white snows, Ah me!"