Thompson’s training seemed admirable for the place. He had proved himself one of the ablest conductors of the Southern Literary Messenger, which Poe had edited before him. He gave it not only his personal services without return, but spent his small patrimony to keep it alive. Frank R. Stockton and Donald G. Mitchell among Northern authors received their first recognition from him, while the small band of Southern literary men regarded the magazine as their section’s chief exponent. When in 1859, at John P. Kennedy’s suggestion, he sought the librarianship of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Longfellow and Edward Everett were among those who wrote recommending him. During the war, while for a time Virginia’s Assistant Secretary of State and later editor of the Richmond Record, he was a kind of laureate of the Confederacy, his spirited verses following many military events of importance. “Ashby,” “The Burial of Latane,” and “Lee to the Rear” are known by every Southern schoolboy, while “Music in Camp” is in every anthology of historical verse. In 1864 he escaped to England on a blockade runner to carry on publicity for the South, and not only worked on the Index, a Confederate organ, but contributed to Blackwood’s, Punch, the Standard, and other periodicals. He was a frequent visitor at Carlyle’s home in Cheyne Row, and is mentioned in Carlyle’s “Reminiscences”, Tennyson entertained him several times at Farringford, and he knew Bulwer, Kingsley, and Thackeray.
He soon became one of the best-liked men on the Post staff. He wrote the extensive review of the first volume of Bryant’s translation of the Iliad in February, 1870, and that of the second that summer; and Bryant came to have him much at his home. There was no more charming conversationalist in New York society. “He had read so variously, observed so minutely, and retained so tenaciously the results of his reading and observation,” Bryant wrote later in the Post, “that he was never at a loss for a topic and never failed to invest what he was speaking of with a rare and original interest. His fund of anecdote was almost inexhaustible, and his ability to illustrate any subject by apt quotation no less remarkable.” John Esten Cooke thought him an unexcelled story-teller, and R. H. Stoddard has agreed.
He was a rebel to be loved, we are told by Watson R. Sperry, later managing editor. “A lot of tall, straggling Virginia gentlemen, ex-soldiers, I fancy, all of them, began to visit the office. Mr. Thompson had a big man’s beard, a delicate body, and a sensitive, feminine nature. He was a bit punctilious, but kindness itself.” His careful attention to dress, verging on foppishness, was less out of place in Bryant’s office than it would have been in Greeley’s or Dana’s. J. Ranken Towse speaks of his personal charm, a reflection of his experience in the best Richmond and London circles. “Though not a marvel of erudition or critical genius, he was a pleasant, cultivated gentleman, refined in taste and manner, genial, humorous, and abundantly capable.”
Unfortunately, Thompson added little to the Post’s literary reputation. In large part this was because of his wretched health, for he steadily wasted away with consumption, was much out of the office, and maintained his energy only by following his doctor’s orders to take large doses of whisky. Early in 1872 his condition was so bad that when Bryant set out for Cuba, the Bahamas, and Mexico, he took Thompson along to escape the rigor of winter. Thompson, moreover, was an essayist and poet rather than a critic. He prepared a book upon his European experiences which was in the bindery of Derby & Jackson when fire destroyed it; and his letters of travel on various vacation tours, with some editorial essays, were his best work for the paper. His most famous poem, the translation of Nadaud’s “Carcassone,” was written in the Evening Post office—“the unfinished manuscript was kicking around on his desk for several days,” says Sperry—but published in Lippincott’s; its popularity rather irritated him.
Even had his health been sound and his critical faculties the best, Thompson could not have made the Post a good literary organ in the present-day sense. It did not want critical or analytic reviews. An entertaining summary or paraphrase would appeal far more to the general reader. Moreover, there was a feeling that American literature was a delicate organism, which needed petting and might have its spirit broken by harsh words. Mr. Towse justly says of Thompson: “His condemnation was apt to be expressed in terms of modified praise. He confined himself largely to what was explanatory or descriptive, though his articles were written fluently and elegantly, were interesting, and had a news, if no great descriptive value.” Bryant reviewed many of the younger poets with the same benignancy with which Howells used to review young novelists in the Easy Chair. The first important volumes of which Thompson wrote notices were the concluding volumes of Froude’s England, Kinglake’s Crimean War, and Motley’s United Netherlands, Raphael Pumpelly’s travels, Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad,” and Miss Alcott’s “Little Women.” The notices consisted of scissors work and tepid comment.
During the years just after the war, indeed, the Post’s columns were singularly devoid of permanent literary interest. The Cary sisters, Miles O’Reilly, and Helen Hunt Jackson contributed verse, and there were various occasional poems, like E. C. Stedman’s “Crete” (1867) and Holmes’s Harvard dinner poem of 1866. Samuel Osgood, for years a prominent minister at the Unitarian Church of the Messiah (Bryant’s church), and a voluminous writer on historical and religious topics, printed many essays. Charles Lanman contributed his interesting recollections of two famous Washington editors, Gales and Seaton, of the National Intelligencer, and there were others of the same small caliber.
The most noteworthy contributions were those, almost the last of his long career, from Bryant’s own pen. The aged poet, after the death of his wife and the conclusion of his translations from Homer, wrote fewer editorials, and many of these at the request of friends, in support of a worthy charity or civic movement. But he did like to write short essays for the editorial page, often printed in minion, on topics ranging from macaronic verse to history and politics. Despite what Hazlitt says of the prose style of poets, that of Bryant was always of unmistakable distinction. When he took such a subject as the beauties of winter as seen at Roslyn (January, 1873), the result was worthy of permanent preservation:
A light but continuous rain fell on Saturday and froze on everything it touched, and wetted the snow only enough to change it on the trees from white to the clearest and most brilliant crystal. So overloaded were they with their icy diamonds that tall cedars bent themselves like nodding plumes, and pines and hemlocks bowed down like tents of cloth of silver over the snowy carpet underneath. The russet leaves of the beeches shone out like frozen leaves of gold, and trunks and boughs and twigs of deciduous trees were as if they had been enameled with melted glass from their very roots to the most delicate extremities. On Sunday morning the sun shone out upon such a landscape as this, to light up, but not to melt, the silvery sheen and the diamond sparkle which winter had sprinkled over all outdoors. One who breathed the exhilaration of the air of that day, and looked upon its wonderful beauty, could hardly find it in the heart to regret the destruction that it caused. But all day long the overloaded trees yielded to the weight of ice, and one who listened could hear in every direction, like the discharge of infantry, the crashing of the falling branches. In some cases whole trees were stripped, leaving only the shattered trunk, a torn and broken shaft with all its glory strewn upon the snow.
Early in 1873 it became evident that Thompson’s condition was desperate. The Post in February, upon the advice of his physician, sent him to Colorado, a step which proved a mistake. He became rapidly worse, started back on April 17, reached the city in a dying state, and passed away at Isaac Henderson’s home on April 30. His funeral in New York was attended by Bryant, Stedman, Richard Watson Gilder, Gen. Pryor, Whitelaw Reid, R. H. Stoddard (whom he made his literary executor, but who did nothing with his manuscripts) and others of prominence; while in Richmond on the same day a meeting was held in his honor by the pulpit, bar, and press in the House of Delegates. His last incomplete review was of the poems of a Southerner, Henry Timrod. Not until 1920 were his own poems collected in a volume sponsored by his alma mater, the University of Virginia.
For some time his place was left unsupplied while Bryant searched for a successor; for the editor had come to the belated conclusion that the literary editorship should be the most important place of its kind in America. While the search was going on, in 1875, the year the Post moved into the fine Bryant Building which Henderson built for it at a cost of $750,000, George Cary Eggleston joined the staff.