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.
And now it deepens; slow and grand It swells, as rolling to the land, An ocean broke upon the strand.
Shout! let it reach the startled Huns!
And roar with all thy festal guns!
It is the answer of thy sons.
Profoundly appealing as are Timrod's war strains, for they are the heart-cry of a people, still it should be noted that there is scarcely a battle ode that does not close with an invocation to peace, such was the lofty nature of the poet. War to him was only the drawn sword of right, and truth, and justice, which accomplished, the prayer for peace was ever on his lips, as witness the noble invocation to Peace, closing his "Christmas", that has so often stirred and hushed at once the heart of the South.
The Ode, written for Memorial Day, April, 1867, of the Confederate graves at Charleston, was his last production. He had sung in lofty strains each phase of the struggle, its hope, its courage, its fear, its despair; he now sings his latest song, a wreath of flowers upon the unmarked graves of the Southern dead, and has hallowed these sacred mounds to his people in the words, --"There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned!"
These poems are written in the life-blood of the poet and his generation.
The patriotic fire, the devoted sacrifice and splendid achievement, that "Carolina", "Cry to Arms", "Unknown Dead", "Carmen Triumphale", "Charleston", "Storm and Calm", and the other of the war poems celebrate were not only the rushing tide of earnest feeling of a noble people then, but are now a part of the glory and heritage of the State, of the South, and of the American republic. They were the mighty heart-beats of that great epoch. They are now irrevocable history, and make these poems a part of the abiding literature of America.
"A Common Thought" is the poet's premonition of his end; but he sees no vision of the dying glory of sunset, no going out into the dark, no presentiment of a vague and gloomy voyage on a homeless sea; but in the sunshine, in the growing light of ever broadening day, amid the joy and splendor of nature, bright prophecy and intuition of immortality, is to come the sudden, solemn mystery of the whisper, "He is gone!" And so it was. For as the sun broadened into glad day, and the full radiance illumined and animated earth and sea and sky, "as it purpled in the zenith, as it brightened on the lawn," this rich young life, in its own fresh morning of genius and spiritual sunshine, passed, and in his own triumphant words, --"not dies, no more than Spirit dies;But in a change like death was clothed with wings."
The Late Judge George S. Bryan It would not be fitting that this memorial edition of Timrod's Poems should go forth to the world without proper recognition, on the part of the TIMROD MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION, of the relation occupied and the services rendered to the poet in his lifetime by the late Hon. George S. Bryan, of Charleston. During the whole of Timrod's career Judge Bryan was his devoted friend, ever ready to assist him materially, morally, and in every other respect.
His faith in Timrod's genius never wavered, and but for his early assistance, sympathy, and encouragement, much of the fruit of that genius would have been lost or wasted. He helped him in adversity, cheered him in his hours of anxiety and despondency, and from first to last, throughout the literary and spiritual history of the poet, he did more than any other friend to keep alive in his heart the steadfast flame of faith in his poetic destiny; Judge Bryan's name must always be inseparably connected with Henry Timrod's in the literary annals of South Carolina.
January, 1899.
Poems of Henry Timrod
