The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-01-18

From the Chicago Record-Herald.
 TT WAS at the age of 22-as roman
 tie. imaginative, highly strung and \ physically delicate young man-that James Ryder Randall, who died at Au- gusta, Ga, on Tuesday, kndled the south to flame with his poem, My Maryland,' Tho verses were almost immediately set to music and the song became one o1 the great battle hymns of the men who tought so gaIIantly for the lost cause MT. Kan dall who was an editor and journalist throughout his life subsequent to the pub lication of his first well-l1nown poem, wrote many other poems besides My Maryland" but that is the one on whlch his claim to fame must rest. In that poem Mr. Randall. at what would now be called the psychological moment, expressed Ill concrete form the very essence or the spirit of the south-placed in rhythm the southern soul.
 The poem sprang to instant favor after it's initial publication in the New Orleans Sunday Delta in April 1861. It was copied and repeated everywhere throughout the south When it was set to music 1t be- came as a torch, lighting the battle fires of the southern armies.
 Brander Matthews has explained the practical effect of the poem on the Con federate cause in this language: "There is often a feeling aaoat in the minds of men, undefined and vague for want of one to give it form, and held in solution until a chance word, dropped in the ear of l poet, suddenly crystalizes this feeling into l song, in which all may see clearly and sharply reflected what in their own thought was shapeless and hazy. It was MT. Randalrs good fortune to be the in- strument through which the south spoke By a natural reaction his burning lines helped to fire the southern heart
 1 So much for this fiery bit of rhymed 1 eloquence as war force. As war poem My Maryland has been praised and repraised and praised again by literary critics and by literary men. "One of the great war poems of the worlds lltera- 1 tures," it has been termed. Oliver Wen 1 dell Holmes said of it: Tt was the best poem produced on either side during the war; MT. Randall himself wrote of it.:
 
 dence was borne to me, that, whatever might be the fate of the Confectionery, my song would survive il"
 Randall wrote the poem when he was an 1 instructor at Poydras college, in the par 1 ish of Point Coupee, La. Born in Bal 1 timore. educated at the Jesuit college at | Georgetown, young Randall had finally drifted to his instructorship in Louisiana. 1 He remained an ardent lover of Baltimore ! and of Maryland. Because of his extreme l lv delicate constitution he was unable to 1 offer his services to the south when the war bugles rang through the land, and his patriotism had to find vent In vol canic outbursts of lyric verse. The cause l for the writing of My Maryland and l the manner of it's writing have been de- scribed by MT Randall as,follows:
 "one April day in 1861 I went on horse back to the postoffice, seven miles distant, l and among the papers handed to me was q copy of the New Orleans Delta, con- 1 taining an account of the passage of a Massachusetts regiment. through Balti- more. and of the bloody encounter conse- 1 ouent upon it. l cannot describe my emo l tions after reading that paper. Baltimore
 was my birthplace, and Frank X. Ward, l the first man wounded in the conflict, Q l Georgetown college man. I could not l sleep. and I arose and, lighting my can l dIe, re-read the portentious telegram.
 'sThen with an uncomfortable impulse, | I began walking the room and striving to express my agitated thoughts in verse. 1 At first the ideas were incoherent and the | yerbiage unsymmetrical. The whole mass | of perturbed utterance was associated l with some kind of musical notation, but | what it was I cannot now determine. l Finally, sat at my desk and began pen