Nature, kinder to his senseless ashes than ever Fortune had been to the living man, is prodigal around his grave—unmarked and unrecorded though it be—of her flowers and verdant grasses, of her rains that fertilize, and her purifying dews. The peace he loved, and so vainly longed for through stormy years, has crept to him at last, but only to fall upon the pallid eyelids, closed forever; upon the pulseless limbs, and the breathless, broken heart. Still it is good to know that
"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well."
Yet, from this mere material repose, this quiet of decaying atoms, surely the most skeptical of thinkers, in contemplation of SUCH a life and SUCH a death, must instinctively look from earth to heaven; from the bruised and mouldering clod to the spirit infinitely exalted, and radiant in redemption.
"A calm, a beautiful, a sacred star."
The poetic creed of Timrod, expressed in his "Vision of Poesy", set the impress upon all his work. Conscious of his power, he reverently believed in the mission of the poet as prophet and teacher,—
"The mission of Genius on Earth! To uplift,
Purify, and confirm, by its own gracious gift,
The world,"—
and he has consecrated his gift to its noblest uses in the discharge of that "high and holy debt".
As lover of man and nature, his sympathy was universal; no theme was too humble for his pen. "The same law that moulds a planet forms a drop of dew." "Humility is power!" "We may trace the mighty sun above even by the shadow of a slender flower." Yet he dealt not with the fleeting; that was only the passing form of the abiding. Passionately fond as he was of Nature, and nourished and refreshed by her always, he never wrote a line of mere descriptive poetry. Nature is only the symbol, the image, to interpret his spiritual meaning. He felt with Milton, in his noble words, that the abiding work is not raised in the heat of youth or the vapors of wine, or by "invocation to dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altars to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases."
Under that inspiration and revelation the poet is a divine interpreter of (in his own words)—
"All lovely things, and gentle—the sweet laugh
Of children, Girlhood's kiss, and Friendship's clasp,
The boy that sporteth with the old man's staff,
The baby, and the breast its fingers grasp—
All that exalts the grounds of happiness,
All griefs that hallow, and all joys that bless,
"To me are sacred; at my holy shrine
Love breathes its latest dreams, its earliest hints;
I turn life's tasteless waters into wine,
And flush them through and through with purple tints.
Wherever Earth is fair, and Heaven looks down,
I rear my altars, and I wear my crown."