or in May “couched in cool shadow” he hears

    The bee-throngs murmurous in the golden fern,
    The wood-doves veiled by depths of flickering green,

for him the music of the spheres is in it all.  Whether at midnight

        The moon, a ghost of her sweet self,

* * * * *

        Creeps up the gray, funereal sky wearily, how wearily,

or morning comes “with gracious breath of sunlight,” it is a part of glorious Nature, his star-crowned Queen, his sun-clad goddess.

To no other heart has the pine forest come so near unfolding its immemorial secret.  That poet-mind was a wind-harp, and its quivering strings echoed to every message that came from the dim old woods on the “soft whispers of the twilight breeze,” the flutterings of the newly awakened morn or the crash of the storm.  “The Dryad of the Pine” bent “earth-yearning branches” to give him loving greeting and receive his quick response: 

    Leaning on thee, I feel the subtlest thrill
    Stir thy dusk limbs, tho’ all the heavens are still,
    And ’neath thy rings of rugged fretwork mark
    What seems a heart-throb muffled in the dark.

“The imprisoned spirits of all winds that blow” echoed to his ear from the heart of the pine-cone fallen from “the wavering height of yon monarchal pine.”

When a glorious pine, to him a living soul, falls under the axe he hears “the wail of Dryads in their last distress.”

In the greenery of his loved and loving pines, with memories happy, though touched to tender sadness by the sorrows that had come to the old-time group of friends, blessed with the companionship of the two loving souls who were dearest to him of all the world, he sang the melodies of his heart till a cold hand swept across the strings of his wonderful harp and chilled them to silence.

In his last year of earth he was invited to deliver at Vanderbilt University a series of lectures on poetry and literature.  Before the invitation reached him he had “fallen into that perfect peace that waits for all.”

“THE FLAME-BORN POET”

HENRY TIMROD

A writer on Southern poets heads his article on one of the most gifted of our children of song, “Henry Timrod, the Unfortunate Singer.”

At first glance the title may seem appropriate.  Viewed by the standard set up by the world, there was little of the wine of success in Timrod’s cup of life.  Bitter drafts of the waters of Marah were served to him in the iron goblet of Fate.  But he lived.  Of how many of the so-called favorites of Fortune could that be said?  Through the mists of his twilit life, he caught glimpses of a sun-radiant morning of wondrous glory.

Thirty years after Timrod’s death a Northern critic, writing of the new birth of interest in Timrod’s work, said:  “Time is the ideal editor.”  Surely, Editor Time’s blue pencil has dealt kindly with our flame-born poet.