Compare with this: Collins's How Sleep the Brave; Tennyson's Balaclava.

3. Henry Timrod (1829-1867) was a native of South Carolina. He attended the University of Georgia but could not finish his course because of poverty. During the Civil War he enlisted as a volunteer for the Confederacy. Before and after the war he devoted himself to literature, and he ranks to-day as one of the most considerable of our Southern poets.

ODE

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.

In seeds of laurel in the earth

The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!

Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years

Which keep in trust your storied tombs,
Behold! your sisters bring their tears
And these memorial blooms.

Small tributes! but your shades will smile
More proudly on these wreaths to-day,
Than when some cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,

By mourning beauty crowned!

Whittier called this Ode "the noblest poem ever written by a Southern poet."

Compare with this Collins's Ode How Sleep the Brave!

4. Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830-1886) was also a South Carolinian. He belonged to a wealthy family and had the best advantages in education and association. He graduated from Charleston College and became identified with the leading literary circles of the city. Because of his health, he could not enlist in the Southern cause at the outbreak of the Civil War, but he wrote many stirring war lyrics to encourage his people.

IN THE WHEAT-FIELD

When the lids of the virgin Dawn unclose,
When the earth is fair and the heavens are calm,
And the early breath of the wakening rose
Floats on the air in balm,

I stand breast-high in the pearly wheat
That ripples and thrills to a sportive breeze,
Borne over the field with its Hermes feet,
And its subtle odor of southern seas;
While out of the infinite azure deep
The flashing wings of the swallows sweep,
Buoyant and beautiful, wild and fleet,
Over the waves of the whispering wheat.

Aurora faints in the fulgent fire

Of the Monarch of Morning's bright embrace,
And the summer day climbs higher and higher
Up the cerulean space;

The pearl-tints fade from the radiant grain
And the sportive breeze of the ocean dies,
And soon in the noontide's soundless rain

The fields seem graced by a million eyes;
Each grain with a glance from its lidded fold
As bright as a gnome's in his mine of gold,
While the slumb'rous glamour of beam and heat
Glides over and under the windless wheat.

Yet the languid spirit of lazy Noon,

With its minor and Morphean music rife,
Is pulsing in low, voluptuous tune
With summer's lust of life.

Hark! to the droning of drowsy wings,

To the honey-bees as they go and come,
To the "boomer" scarce rounding his sultry rings,
The gnat's small horn and the beetle's hum;
And hark to the locust!-noon's one shrill song,
Like the tingling steel of an elfin gong,

Grows lower through quavers of long retreat
To swoon on the dazzled and distant wheat.

Now day declines! and his shafts of might
Are sheathed in a quiver of opal haze;
Still thro' the chastened, but magic light,
What sunset grandeurs blaze!
For the sky, in its mellowed luster, seems
Like the realm of a master poet's mind,-
A shifting kingdom of splendid dreams,—
With fuller and fairer truths behind;
And the changeful colors that blend or part,
Ebb like the tides of a living heart,

As the splendor melts and the shadows meet,
And the tresses of Twilight trail over the wheat.

Compare with this Lanier's Corn.

5. Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), the musician poet, is next to Poe the greatest of our Southern writers. He was born in Georgia and educated at Oglethorpe College. During the Civil War he entered the ranks of the Confederacy and was confined for five months in a Union prison. After the war he went to Baltimore, where he was engaged as flute-player by the Peabody Orchestra and later as lecturer on English literature by Johns Hopkins University. The musical quality of his verse is remarkable, as is shown in the following selections.

THE MARSHES OF GLYNN

O braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the vine, While the riotous noonday sun of the June day long did

shine

Ye held me fast in your heart and I held you fast in mine; But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest,

And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West, And the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream,

Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,

And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke

Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low, And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know, And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within, That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn

Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me

of yore

When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bit

terness sore,

And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain,

Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face

The vast, sweet visage of space.

To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn,
Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,
For a mete and a mark

Thus with your favor soft, with a reverent hand,
(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)
Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand
On the firm-packed sand,

Free

By a world of marsh, that borders a world of sea.

Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band

Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land.

Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger and curl

As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows the firm sweet limbs of a girl.

Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight, Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of light.

And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stands high?

The world lies east: how ample the marsh and the sea and the sky!

A league and a league of marsh grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,

Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a

shade,

Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,

To the terminal blue of the main.

Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free

From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin, By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free

Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!

Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily

won

God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain
And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and
the skies:

By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God: