To rest where Easter breezes stir
Around the sacred sepulcher.
I know what a fashion it is to worship at the shrines of the “Lake poets,” and how Wordsworth and Burns and Shelley and like singers of the Old World, with Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell of the New, are set on high as the greater masters of poesy. But if genius is a thing of quality rather than quantity, I go back to the dark days and memories of battle and take my stand lovingly beside the new-made grave of Timrod, the poet laureate of the Confederacy, and call to mind what I believe to be a poem that the greatest of English and American poets would be glad to claim as their own. Remember, as you read it, how in his dire want the poet wrote of the little book of which it is a part: “I would consign every line of it to oblivion for one hundred dollars in hand.”
Spring, with that nameless pathos in the air
Which dwells with all things fair;
Spring, with her golden suns and silver rains,
Is with us once again.
Still there’s a sense of blossoms yet unborn
In the sweet airs of morn;