WAITMAN BARBE.
1864= ——.
Waitman Barbe was born at Morgantown, West Virginia, and educated at the State University in that town. Since the year 1884 he has been engaged in editorial and literary pursuits, being now editor of the Daily State Journal. He has already made a reputation as a speaker on literary and educational topics: and his poems, first appearing in periodicals, have now been collected into a volume called “Ashes and Incense,” the first edition of which was exhausted in six months. It “has put him among the foremost of the young American poets.” Edmund Clarence Stedman says of it: “There is real poetry in the book—a voice worth owning and exercising. I am struck with the beauty and feeling of the lyrics which I have read—such, for example, as the stanzas on Lanier and ‘The Comrade Hills.’”
WORKS.
Ashes and Incense.
SIDNEY LANIER.
(From Ashes and Incense.[51])
O Spirit to a kingly holding born!
As beautiful as any southern morn
That wakes to woo the willing hills,
Thy life was hedged about by ills
As pitiless as any northern night;
Yet thou didst make it as thy “Sunrise” bright.