Public life he generally avoided; offices which he might have held, he would not accept, although urged upon him. A loyal, ardent Odd Fellow, like Abou Ben Adhem, he "loved his fellow-man," and was loved by them in turn. His addresses and poems on the anniversaries of this order, and at decorations of the soldiers' graves were much admired. Though educated for an Episcopal clergyman, he never united with the church, at least in the South, more than as a vestryman for a time. It is to be regretted that, with outward eye so quick to see and interpret the true and beautiful, his eyes of faith could not discern more clearly the full truth and beauty of God's written Revelation. If so, his pathetic lines on "Hope," composed a few years after his wife's death, would have had a more triumphant ring than is contained in the last two stanzas. Elsewhere hopes shines brighter and faith soars on stronger wings, as when in his "In Memoriam" poem to his wife, he sings:
"Still for this grief so desolate, so lone,
A solace for unmated hearts is given,
Another hand, another voice hath known
The symphonies of heaven."
In the sixty-fourth year of his age, at the season he loved best, the Christmas-tide, December 27, 1887, the gentle spirit of William Ward softly slipped from its earthly moorings. His body by loving hands was tenderly laid to rest in the cemetery at Macon, his home for nearly two score years.
His spirit still lingers with us, embodied in the songs which he sang, now out of a glad, now out of an aching heart. Well has it been said that a poet least of all needs a monumental pile. The Iliad towers high above the Pyramids, and will outlast them by ages. William Ward has left no Iliad; he sang not of the gods and demi-gods; he struck the lyre, and not the full-resounding harp. Intuition, early environment and scholastic training, as has been shown, combined to make of him a poet. Life's dull and dark experiences seemed to repress but could not suppress in him the "noble rage." Visions of beauty continually flitted in his imagination; music from choirs, visible and invisible, seemed ever to soothe and charm his troubled, lonely heart. Especially in the closing years of his life was poetry a joy and comfort to him. As the burdens of life were shifted to the shoulders of his children, he found more leisure, it appears, and indulged more frequently in poetic expression of the mood or thought that deeply stirred within.
As might be supposed, his poems are of as diverse themes and varied measures as the moods and occasions which suggested them. In them may be best shown the poet and to some extent the man; hence, they deserve and, it is believed, will repay a full and close investigation. Hear him first, as in patriotic strain, he invites the world to his adopted land:
COME TO THE SOUTH.
Come to our hill-sides and come to our prairies,
Broaden our fields with the spade and the plow;
Bring us from Deutsche-land to gardens and dairies,
To household and kitchen the fraulein and frau;
Come from the birth-land of Goethe and Schiller,
Scholar and poet and teacher and priest;
Come where each acre of tilth needs a tiller,
And people the South with the strength of the East;
Bring you the songs and dance of Rhine-land
The legends and sports of your home if you will;
Give us the lays of your forest and vine-land,
With the strong arm of labor the artisan's skill.
Come from the cliffs where the sea-eagle fledges
His brood o'er the wild ocean-storm of the North,
Where the fisher-boats play round the moss-mantled ledges,
Where the sea-kraken sports and the maelstrom has birth;
Leave you the land where the treacherous glacier
Mocks you, blinded and chilled with its pitiless glare,
Where all save the mist-clouded rim of the geyser
In the impotent sunlight lies frozen and bare;
Where Hecla sits mailed like a desolate giant,
With his flame-covered crest and his foot-stool of snow,
O'er the storm-rended realm of the Viking defiant,
And the sea rolling red in his terrible glow.
We call you, O men of the kilt and the tartan,
From highland and lowland, from mountain and mere—
Though you feel for your country the love of a Spartan,
A sunnier home and a welcome is here;
Must you cling to the fields where the gorse and the heather
That bloomed for your grandsires still blossom for you?
Cannot hopes that await you here loosen the tether
Which a birthright descended has cast over you?
There is room, there is work for the peer and the peasant,
From the land of the shamrock, the olive, and vine,
You may lift up unquestioned the cross with the crescent,
Or the lilies of France with the thistle-bloom twine.