Timrod possessed an ardent spirit that was stirred to its depths by the Civil War. His martial songs, with their fierce intensity, better voiced the feelings of the South at that time than those of Hayne or any other Southern singer. In his Ethnogenesis—the birth of a nation—he celebrates in a lofty strain the rise of the Confederacy, of which he cherished large and generous hopes:—
"The type
Whereby we shall be known in every land
Is that vast gulf which lips our Southern strand,
And through the cold, untempered ocean pours
Its genial streams, that far off Arctic shores
May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze
Strange tropic warmth and hints of summer seas."
But his most stirring lyrics are Carolina and A Cry to Arms, which in the exciting days of '61 deeply moved the Southern heart, but which today serve as melancholy mementos of a long-past sectional bitterness. Of the vigorous lines of the former, Hayne says in an interesting autobiographic touch, "I read them first, and was thrilled by their power and pathos, upon a stormy March evening in Fort Sumter! Walking along the battlements, under the red lights of a tempestuous sunset, the wind steadily and loudly blowing from off the bar across the tossing and moaning waste of waters, driven inland; with scores of gulls and white sea-birds flying and shrieking round me,—those wild voices of Nature mingled strangely with the rhythmic roll and beat of the poet's impassioned music. The very spirit, or dark genius, of the troubled scene appeared to take up, and to repeat such verses as:—
"'I hear a murmur as of waves
That grope their way through sunless caves,
Like bodies struggling in their graves,
Carolina!
"'And now it deepens; slow and grand
It swells, as rolling to the land,
An ocean broke upon the strand,
Carolina!'"
These impassioned war lyrics brought the poet speedy popularity. For a time his hopes were lifted up to a roseate future. In 1862 some of his influential friends formed the project of bringing out a handsome edition of his poems in London. The war correspondent of the London Illustrated News, himself an artist, volunteered to furnish original illustrations. The scheme, at which the poet was elated, promised at once bread and fame. But, as in so many other instances, he was doomed to bitter disappointment. The increasing stress of the great conflict absorbed the energies of the South; and the promising plan, notwithstanding the poet's popularity, was buried beneath the noise and tumult of battle.
Disqualified by feeble health from serving in the ranks, Timrod, shortly after the battle of Shiloh, went to Tennessee as the war correspondent of the Charleston Mercury. To his retiring and sympathetic nature the scenes of war were painful. "One can scarcely conceive," says Dr. Bruns, "of a situation more hopelessly wretched than that of a mere child in the world's ways suddenly flung down into the heart of that strong retreat, and tossed like a straw on the crest of those refluent waves, from which he escaped as by a miracle."
In 1863 he went to Columbia as associate editor of the South Carolinian. He was scarcely less happy and vigorous in prose than in verse. A period of prosperity seemed at last to be dawning; and, in the cheerful prospect, he ventured to marry Miss Kate Goodwin of Charleston, "Katie, the fair Saxon," whom he had long loved and of whom he had sung in one of his longest and sweetest poems. But his happiness was of brief duration. In a twelvemonth the army of General Sherman entered Columbia, demolished his office, and sent him adrift as a helpless fugitive.
The close of the war found him a ruined man; he was almost destitute of property and broken in health. He was obliged to sell some of his household furniture to keep his family in bread. "We have," he says, in a sadly playful letter to Hayne at this period, "we have—let me see!—yes, we have eaten two silver pitchers, one or two dozen silver forks, several sofas, innumerable chairs, and a huge—bedstead!" He could find no paying market for his poems in the impoverished South; and in the North political feeling was still too strong to give him access to the magazines there. The only employment he could find was some clerical work for a season in the governor's office, where he sometimes toiled far beyond his strength. In this time of discouragement and need, the gloom of which was never lifted, he pathetically wrote to Hayne: "I would consign every line of my verse to eternal oblivion for one hundred dollars in hand."
In 1867 his physicians recommended a change of air; and accordingly he spent a month with his lifelong friend Hayne at Copse Hill. It was the one rift in the clouds before the fall of night. There is a pathetic beauty in the fellowship of the two poets during these brief weeks, when, with spirits often attuned to high thought and feeling, they roamed together among the pines or sat beneath the stars. "We would rest on the hillsides," says Hayne, "in the swaying golden shadows, watching together the Titanic masses of snow-white clouds which floated slowly and vaguely through the sky, suggesting by their form, whiteness, and serene motion, despite the season, flotillas of icebergs upon Arctic seas. Like lazzaroni we basked in the quiet noons, sunk in the depths of reverie, or perhaps of yet more 'charmed sleep.' Or we smoked, conversing lazily between the puffs,—