Part 5 (1/2)

We should like to think of life as flowing on serenely in that pretty cottage on Henderson Street, Columbia, its wide front veranda crowned with a combed roof supported by a row of white columns. In its cool dimness we may in fancy see the nature-loving poet at eventide looking into the greenery of a friendly tree stretching great arms lovingly to the shadowy porch. A taller tree stands sentinel at the gate, as if to guard the poet-soul from the world and close it around with the beauty that it loved.

But life did not bring him any more of joy or success than he had achieved in the long years of toil and sorrow and disappointment, brightened by the flame of his own genius throwing upon the dark wall of existence the pictures that imagination drew with magic hand upon his sympathetic, ever responsive mind. On the sixth of October, after that month of iridescent beauty on Copse Hill, came the days of which he had written long before:

As it purples in the zenith, As it brightens on the lawn, There's a hush of death about me, And a whisper, ”He is gone!”

On Copse Hill, ”Under the Pine,” his lifelong friend stood and sorrowfully questioned:

O Tree! have not his poet-touch, his dreams So full of heavenly gleams, Wrought through the folded dulness of thy bark, And all thy nature dark Stirred to slow throbbings, and the fluttering fire Of faint, unknown desire?

Near the end of his last visit he had told Paul Hayne that he did not wish to live to be old--”an octogenarian, far less a centenarian, like old Parr.” He hoped that he might stay until he was fifty or fifty-five; ”one hates the idea of a mummy, intellectual or physical.”

If those coveted years had been added to his thirty-eight beautiful ones, a brighter radiance might have crowned our literature. Or, would the vision have faded away with youth?

On the seventh of October, 1867, Henry Timrod was laid to rest in Trinity Churchyard, Columbia, beside his little Willie, ”the Christmas gift of G.o.d” that brought such divine light to the home only to leave it in darkness when the gift was recalled before another Christmas morn had gladdened the world. The poet's grave is marked by a shaft erected by loving hands, but a memorial more fitting to one who so loved the beautiful is found in the waving gra.s.ses and the fragrant flowers that Nature spreads for her lover, and the winds of heaven that breathe soft dirges over his lowly mound.

In Was.h.i.+ngton Square, Charleston, stands a monument erected in 1901 by the Timrod Memorial a.s.sociation of South Carolina to the memory of the most vivid poet the South has given to the world. On the west panel is an inscription which expresses to us the mainspring of his character:

Through clouds and through suns.h.i.+ne, in peace and in war, amid the stress of poverty and the storms of civil strife, his soul never faltered and his purpose never failed. To his poetic mission he was faithful to the end. In life and in death he was ”not disobedient unto the Heavenly vision.”

On the panel facing the War Monument are three stanzas from his own beautiful Ode, sung at the decoration of Confederate graves in Magnolia Cemetery in 1867--such a little time before his pa.s.sing that it seems to have mournful, though unconscious, allusion to his own early fall in the heat of earth's battle:

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves; Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause, Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause.

In seeds of laurel in the earth The blossom of your fame is blown, And somewhere, waiting for its birth, The shaft is in the stone.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!

There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned!

The shaft which the prophetic eye of Timrod saw ”in the stone” was in time revealed, and years later that other shaft, awaiting the hour for doing homage to the poet, found the light. To-day the patriot soldiers asleep in Magnolia, and their poet alike, have stately testimonials of the loving memory of their people.

[Note: The quotations from Henry Timrod found in this book are used by special permission of the B.F. Johnson Publis.h.i.+ng Company, the authorized publishers of Timrod's Poems.]

”FATHER ABBOT”

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS

Woodlands, near Midway, the half-way stop between Charleston and Augusta, was a little kingdom of itself in the years of its greatness when William Gilmore Simms was monarch of the fair domain. It was far from being a monastery, though its master was known as ”Father Abbot.”

The t.i.tle had clung to him from the pseudonym under which he had written a series of letters to a New York paper, upholding the view that Charlestonians should not go north on health-seeking vacations when they had better places nearer home, mentioning Sullivan's Island where the hospitable Fort Moultrie officers ”were good hands at drawing a cork.” Of course, he meant a trigger.

Rather was Woodlands a bit of enchanted forest cut from an old black-letter legend, in which one half expected to meet mediaeval knights on foaming steeds--every-day folk ride jogging horses--threading their way through the mysterious forest aisles in search of those romantic adventures which were necessary to give knights of that period an excuse for existence. It chanced, however, that the only knights known to Woodlands were the old-time friends of its master and the youthful writers who looked to ”Father Abbot” for literary guidance.

Having welcomed his guests with the warmth and urbanity which made him a most enjoyable comrade, Father Abbot would disperse them to seek entertainment after the manner agreeable to them. For the followers of old Isaac Walton there was prime fis.h.i.+ng in the Edisto River, that ”sweet little river” that ripples melodiously through ”Father Abbot's”

pages. To hunters the forest offered thrilling occupation. For the pleasure rider smooth, white, sandy bridle-paths led in silvery curves through forests of oak or pine to the most delightful of Nowheres.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WOODLANDS, THE HOME OF WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS By courtesy of D. Appleton & Company]

Having put each guest into the line of his fancy, the master of Woodlands would betake himself to his library to write his thirty pages, the daily stint he demanded from the loom of his imagination.