The varied and stirring acts of that terrible drama—its trying suspense and harrowing shocks—its constant strain and privations must have graven deep upon southern hearts a picture of that time; and there it will stand forever, distinct—indelible—etched by the mordant of sorrow!
Where does history show more stirring motives for poetry? Every rood of earth, moistened and hallowed with sacred blood, sings to-day a noble dirge, wordless, but how eloquent! No whitewashed ward in yonder hospital, but has written in letters of life its epic of heroism, of devotion, and of triumphant sacrifice!
Every breeze that swept from those ravished homes, whence peace and purity had fled before the sword, the torch and that far blacker—nameless horror!—each breeze bore upon its wing a pleading prayer for peace, mingled and drowned in the hoarse notes of a stirring cry to arms!
But not only did our people feel all this. They spoke it with universal voice—in glowing, burning words that will live so long as strength and tenderness and truth shall hold their own in literature.
For reasons thus roughly sketched, no great and connected effort had been made at the South before the war. Though there had been sudden and fitful flashes of rare warmth and promise, they had died before their fire was communicated. That the fire was there, latent and still, they bore witness; but it needed the rough and cruel friction of the war to bring it to the surface.
What the southron felt he spoke; and out of the bitterness of his trial the poetry of the South was born. It leaped at one bound from the overcharged brain of our people—full statured in its stern defiance mailed in the triple panoply of truth.
There was endless poetry written in the North on the war; and much of it came from the pens of men as eminent as Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier and Holmes. But they wrote far away from the scenes they spoke of—comfortably housed and perfectly secure. The men of the North wrote with their pens, while the men of the South wrote with their hearts!
A singular commentary upon this has been given us by Mr. Richard Grant White—himself a member of the committee. In April, 1861, a committee of thirteen New Yorkers—comprising such names as Julian Verplanck, Moses Grinnell, John A. Dix and Geo. Wm. Curtis—offered a reward of five hundred dollars for a National Hymn! What hope, feeling, patriotism and love of the cause had failed to produce—for the lineal descendants of the "Star Spangled Banner" were all in the South, fighting under the bars instead of the stripes—was to be drawn out by the application of a greenback poultice! The committee advertised generally for five hundred dollars' worth of pure patriotism, to be ground out "in not less than sixteen lines, nor more than forty."
Even with this highest incentive, Mr. White tells us that dozens of barrelfuls of manuscript were rejected; and not one patriot was found whose principles—as expressed in his poetry—were worth that much money! Were it not the least bit saddening, the contemplation of this attempt to buy up fervid sentiment would be inexpressibly funny.
Memory must bring up, in contrast, that night of 1792 in Strasbourg, when the gray dawn, struggling with the night, fell upon the pale face and burning eyes of Rouget de Lisle—as with trembling hand he wrote the last words of the Marseillaise. The mind must revert, in contrast, to those ravished hearths and stricken homes and decimated camps, where the South wrought and suffered and sang—sang words that rose from men's hearts, when the ore of genius fused and sparkled in the hot blast of their fervid patriotism!