I
The little group of Southern poets that had gathered itself about Paul Hamilton Hayne (1831–1886), the chief of whom were Margaret Junkin Preston (1820–1897), Francis Orrery Ticknor (1822–1874), and Henry Timrod (1829–1867)—poets who were contemporary with Bayard Taylor and his group—belongs rather with the period before the war than with the new national period that followed it. They were poets of beauty like Stoddard, singing the music of Keats and Tennyson and the old Cavalier poets—dreamers, makers of dainty conceits and pretty similes, full of grace and often of real melody, but with little originality either of manner or message. The war came into their lives sharply and suddenly, a cataclysm that shook all their plans into ruins about them. It swept away their property, their homes, their libraries, even their health. For a time during the conflict they turned their poetry into martial channels: invectives on the invading "Huns," rallying songs, battle lyrics, patriotic calls. When the war was over they found themselves powerless to adjust themselves. Hayne before the war was a graceful sonneteer, a worshiper of classic beauty, a writer of odes, not to the nightingale but to the mocking bird:
A golden pallor of voluptuous light
Filled the warm southern night:
The moon, clear orbed, above the sylvan scene
Moved like a stately queen,
So rife with conscious beauty all the while,
What could she do but smile
At her own perfect loveliness below,
Glassed in the tranquil flow
Of crystal fountains and unruffled streams?
Even his war poems are gentle and softly poetic. After the war he lapsed into lyrics of retrospect and contemplation with a minor note always of gentle resignation. He lived to write elegies on Timrod and Lanier and to make himself the threnodist of the old South:
Forgotten! Tho' a thousand years should pass,
Methinks our air will throb with memory's thrills,
A common grief weigh down the faltering grass,
A pathos shroud the hills;
Waves roll lamenting; autumn sunsets yearn
For the old time's return.
A more sensitively imaginative poet was Timrod, yet even he was not strong enough to lead his time and become more than a minor singer. He was of the old South and would have been wholly out of place in the new even had he lived. More fire and Hebraic rage there were in him than in Hayne, indeed than in any other American poet save Whittier. Once or twice when his life was shaken to the center by the brutalities of war he burst into cries that still quiver with passion:
Oh! standing on this desecrated mold,
Methinks that I behold,
Lifting her bloody daisies up to God,
Spring kneeling on the sod,
And calling with the voice of all her rills,
Upon the ancient hills
To fall and crush the tyrants and the slaves
That turn her meads to graves.
And again at the climax of "The Cotton Boll":
Oh, help us, Lord! to roll the crimson flood
Back on its course, and, while our banners wing
Northward, strike with us! till the Goth shall cling
To his own blasted altar-stones, and crave
Mercy; and we shall grant it, and dictate
The lenient future of his fate
There, where some rotting ships and crumbling quays
Shall one day mark the port which ruled the Western seas.
And what other poet save Whittier could after victory burst into Hebraic ecstasy of joy like this?
Our foes are fallen! Flash, ye wires!
The mighty tidings far and nigh!
Ye cities! write them on the sky
In purple and in emerald fires!
They came with many a haughty boast;
Their threats were heard on every breeze;
They darkened half the neighboring seas;
And swooped like vultures on the coast.
False recreants in all knightly strife,
Their way was wet with woman's tears;
Behind them flamed the toil of years,
And bloodshed stained the sheaves of life.
They fought as tyrants fight, or slaves;
God gave the dastards to our hands;
Their bones are bleaching on the sands,
Or moldering slow in shallow graves.
But it was like pouring molten bullet lead from Satsuma vase. The fragile, beautiful life that should have known nothing harsher than the music of poets and the laughter of children and lovers, broke under the strain of war and poverty and neglect, and his life went out miserably at thirty-eight.