The semi-weekly messenger. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1897-1908, 1899-12-26
ssA POET OF THE ALTAR AND
The CONFEDERACY.

To any one who loves the south and
takes pride in her most gifted sons and
daushters, and especially in the few
singers of real inspiration-possessed Of
the divine affatus-who have writ
ten Of nature and sung in pathetic
strain, it is pleasant to know that "The
Timrod Memorial Association of South
Carolina" has lone so well thus far
in it's plan to honor the richly endoW-
ed poet who, i k Thomas Chartterton,
"perished in his prime" and TO finally
erect a. worthy memorial. An edition
of 4,00b volumes-and it is a very neat,
q very attractive ition-W issued,
apparently something hazardous, and
already three-fifths have been disposed
of. It is to be much desired that the
remaining volumes shall be rapidly
taken up by an appreciative public.
The south ann afford to neglect the
appeal of the Memorial Association"
1t would be a reproach to the Guilt
waited people of this great section of
such a true, artistic, noble poet were
not appreciated rightly and his mem
DRY honored. Richard Henry Stod-
dard, one of the Oldest and best of liv-
ing poets in the north, in his literary
and critical columns, in The New
York Mail and Express, wrote this of
Tirnrod scme time since:
I'VE have long been interested in the
poetry of Mr.. Timrod, not only for
what it was, for it's tenderness, it's
grace, its purity, but for the promise
of greater things to which ne did not,
and could not, we'll attain, his life was
so comparatively brief, so crippled by
his experiences during our great civil
war, and SO broken, so pOWerless, as
We may say, from his poverty and his
suffering. + = Such was the, short,
sad life of Henry Timrod, who, being
dead, yet ~speaketh in this volume,
which needs no c~ommendation of ours,
since it more than juStifes his claim
to an assured place among the poets of
America, and, as it seems to us, q very
high place among the poets of ne
SOUTH
There have been a great number of
sympathetic and kind notices in the
public journals in the north and in the
south of this dear son of song, n our
grieved southland, and many fine man
ifestations of insight as we'll as felici-
tous wording have been printed. h
Baltimore Christian Advocate was
specially happy in discussing Timrod
as "a Poet of the Altar" We make
room for this admirable Interpretation
of the man who sang from his soul and
filled his pages with pathos:
"a poet of the altar! In a wide and
also in a strait significance TlmrOd
is a religious poet. That he died re-
eceiVing the might have been
fairly inferred from a study Of his
works. If ever a poet felt Christianity,
surely this man did. In almost every
,one of the fifteen well-nigh faultless
-sonnets he composed is the heartbeat
of that particularly God-familiar spir-
ituality which one find only in the
Christian religion.
I'm other poems, too, his cast Of
mind is in frequent, if not constant,
evidence. tbs attitude toward all the
problems of life, pre-eminently toward,
grief, is essentially and uniquely Chris
tian. There is power IN MS
humility; there is vital value in his
spiritual suggestions as well as genu-
inc artistic value in his music. Spon-
taneous and artlesS as much as his
verse at first apprehension seems,
within his we'll chosen limits he is a
true artist. Fewer blurs of teohnic will
be found in his verse than in the same
mass of rhymes by the vast majority
of modern composers. One of his odes,
suns at the decoration of the graves Of
the confederate dead in Charleston, is
absolutely flawless-perfect as was the
Pantheon; and a few of his poems have
a haunting grace of music and of senti-
ment matchable only in their vein by
Heine and Catullus."