A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves / Poems of James Barron Hope

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Robert Prince, and the
Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
To the memory of the gallant little lad who bore his grandfather's name and image—to the dear remembrance of:
Barron Hope Marr
His mother dedicates whatsoever there may be of worth in her effort to show James Barron Hope, the Poet, as Virginia's Laureate, and James Barron Hope, the Man, as he was loved and reverenced by his household and his friends.
It has been claimed for James Barron Hope that he was Virginia's Laureate. He did not deal in abstractions, or generalized arguments, or vague mysticisms. He fired the imagination purely, he awoke lofty thoughts and presented, through his noble odes that which is the soul of every true poem, a living succession of concrete images and pictures.
James Barron, the elder, organized the Virginia Colonial Navy, of which he was commander-in-chief during the Revolution, and his sons, Samuel and James, served gallantly in the United States Navy. It was from these ancestors that James Barron Hope derived that unswerving devotion to his native state for which he was remarkable, and it was at the residence of his grandfather, Commodore James Barron, the younger, who then commanded the Gosport Navy-yard, that he was born the 23d of March, 1829.
His mother, Jane Barron, was the eldest daughter of the Commodore and most near to his regard. An attractive gentlewoman of the old school, generous, of quick and lively sympathies, she wielded a clever, ready pen, and the brush and embroiderer's needle in a manner not to be scorned in those days, and was a personage in her family.
Her child was the child not only of her material, but of her spiritual being, and the two were closely knit as the years passed, in mutual affection and confidence, in tastes and aspirations.
His father was Wilton Hope of Bethel, Elizabeth City County, a handsome, talented man, a landed proprietor, of a family whose acres bordered the picturesque waters of Hampton River.