Of him was quoted that noble epitaph on the great Lord Fairfax:
'Both sexes' virtues in him combined,
He had the fierceness of the manliest mind,
And all the meekness too of woman kind.'
'He never knew what envy was, nor hate,
His soul was filled with worth and honesty,
And with another thing quite out of date, called modesty.'
No sketch could approach justice toward Captain Hope without at least a brief review of his domestic life.
In 1857 he had married Miss Annie Beverly Whiting of Hampton. Hers were the face and form to take captive his poet's fancy, and she possessed a character as lovely as her person; a courage and strength of will far out of proportion to her dainty shape, and an intellect of masculine robustness. Often the editor brought his work to the table of his library that he might avail himself of his wife's judgment, and labor with the faces around him that he loved, for their union was a very congenial one, and when two daughters came to bless it, as husband and father, he poured out the treasures of his heart, his mind and soul. To his children he was a wise teacher, a tender guide, an unfailing friend, the most delightful of companions. His sympathy for and his understanding of young people never aged, and he had a circle of dear and familiar friends of varying ages that gathered about him once a week. There, beside his own hearth, his ready wit, his kindly humor sparkled most brightly, and there flowed forth most evenly that speech accounted by many well worth the hearing. For his was also the art of listening; he not only led the expression of thought, but inspired it in others. His own roof-tree looked down upon James Barron Hope at his best and down upon a home in the sacred sense of the word, for he touched with poetry the prose of daily living, and left to those who loved him the blessed legacy of a memory which death cannot take from them.
I have said that in his early years Old Hampton claimed him. He became the son of the city of his adoption and sleeps among her dead.
Above his ashes rises a shaft, fashioned from the stones of the
State he loved so well which proclaims that it is "The tribute of
his friends offered to the memory of the Poet, Patriot, Scholar, and
Journalist and the Knightly Virginia Gentleman."