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.