"Bright sea! no more the naiad haunts
Thy pearl founts with a syren spell,
No sea-nymph on thy foam-bed pants,
Within her rainbow spawning cell,
The halo of departed years—
Sleeps like a dream upon thy sky,
While the dark curse of blood and tears
Is echoed back with freedom's sigh."
"Oh Greece! could ye but boast of Greeks the shame
That gathers o'er thee now would make thy altars flame."
For the tenderness and warmth of sentiment expressed therein, the poem, "Our Own New England," merits more than simple reference to it. The last stanza shows how thoroughly Southern in ten years he had become. Friendships strong and lasting had been formed, and he was now prominent among the citizens of a town that even then prided itself on its culture. One of the intimate friends of Alexander K. McClung, he has left an appreciative tribute to that powerful, but somber and erratic genius.
In 1850 Mr. Ward removed to Macon; Mississippi, and there lived till his death in 1887. Early in the fifties he married Miss Emilie A. Whiffen, an estimable and highly cultured young lady of English parentage, then teaching in a female institute at Crawford, Miss. The Philadelphia Courier contained a pleasant notice of the marriage, from which this extract is taken: "We sincerely congratulate our esteemed correspondent, William Ward, Jr., Esq., whose delightful verses have enriched but too seldom our Poet's Corner, upon the agreeable fact reported in our hymeneal department last week." These were his halcyon days, during which he was prosperous and serenely joyful in his home. In 1856, he built in the woods skirting the eastern edge of the town the modest but tasteful little cottage in which he spent the remainder of his days. To verse he seems to have given but little time during those busy years; though occasionally he still contributed a poem to the Courier and to the Macon and Columbus papers. Three daughters and a son came to increase his pleasures and his cares. Meanwhile the war cloud lowered and the tempest broke in fury on the land he had learned to love and call his own. But this was little heeded in comparison with the calamity which befell him in the midst of those dreadful days in the loss of his devoted and helpful wife. His life "cleft in twain," as he expressed it, from that time forward is thus described by one who knew and loved him: "To his half-orphaned children he became father and mother. We have seen him in his cottage home spending his evenings in the bosom of his little family, assisting his daughters with their lessons, amusing the children, looking after their comfort, and doing all in his power to make them happy. Proud and sensitive, he bravely struggled through poverty that came to so many Southern families; and though at times obliged to add the office of housekeeper to that of bread-winner for his young family, he never sank the dignity of a gentleman to the servility of a drudge."
Under these circumstances, all the more honor is due to him that after the war he spurned the offers of place and wealth extended by carpet-bag leaders of the Republican party who knew of his Northern birth. Instead of such a course, he became in 1870 editor of the Macon Beacon, and was as pronounced a Democrat as he had been Whig in former years. During intervals of work in his little shop he hurriedly wrote his editorials; and might often be seen walking up and down behind the counter evolving a poem or a prose reverie, oblivious to his surroundings. But to poetry he gave no more time than, as he said, he must. Outside the joys of companionship with books and with his children, he could truly have exclaimed with Burns:
"Lease me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure,
My chief, amaist my only pleasure."
With his little ones, on Sundays, he walked in the woods hard by his house; and on clear nights he often pointed out to them the stars and constellations, and told them of the myths that cluster about Orion, the Pleiads and other denizens of the nightly firmament. He had his own telescope and frequently searched the heavens with it for hours. "It is well," he says, "to look upon the Christmas skies when the most glorious constellations of the year are gathered as at the world's great festival. It will give us higher conceptions of life and tone down excesses we too often indulge in through the anniversary week that closes up the year."
But let us look more closely at the man himself and then give his work such examination as time left us will admit. Tall, slender, erect in carriage, clean shaven, with dark brown hair and eyes, rapid in his movements, the scholar and the gentleman written unmistakably on every lineament, and William Ward, the man, is as nearly portrayed as can now be done; for except a little daguerreotype taken for his wife, which has been lost, he sat for no other picture. Singularly reserved and almost shy in public, with his children and with his intimate friends he was delightfully communicative, a vein of quiet humor often outcropping in his words and deeds.