r from you
soon--VERY soon! You'll do me more good than medicines!" etc.

On the 25th of the month confidence in Timrod's recovery was confirmed
by a letter from Mrs. Goodwin:--

"Our brother," she writes, "is decidedly better; and if there be no
recurrence of the hemorrhage will, I hope, be soon convalescent!"

A week and upwards passed on in silence. I received no more
communications from Columbia. But early in October a vaguely threatening
report reached my ears. On the 9th it was mournfully confirmed.
Forty-eight hours before, Henry Timrod had expired!

On the 7th of October, the mortal remains of the poet, so worn and
shattered, were buried in the cemetery of Trinity Church, Columbia.

There, in the ruined capital of his native State, whence scholarship,
culture, and social purity have been banished to give place to the
orgies of semi-barbarians and the political trickery of adventurers and
traitors; there, tranquil amid the vulgar turmoil of factions, reposes
the dust of one of the truest and sweetest singers this country has
given to the world.

Nature, kinder to his senseless ashes than ever Fortune had been to the
living man, is prodigal around his grave--unmarked and unrecorded though
it be--of her flowers and verdant grasses, of her rains that fertilize,
and her purifying dews. The peace he loved, and so vainly longed for
through stormy years, has crept to him at last, but only to fall upon
the pallid eyelids, closed forever; upon the pulseless limbs, and the
breathless, broken heart. Still it is good to know that

"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well."

Yet, from this mere material repose, this quiet of decaying atoms,
surely the most skeptical of thinkers, in contemplation of SUCH a life
and SUCH a death, must instinctively look from earth to heaven; from
the bruised and mouldering clod to the spirit infinitely exalted, and
radiant in redemption.

"A calm, a beautiful, a sacred star."

The poetic creed of Timrod, expressed in his "Vision of Poesy", set
the impress upon all his work. Conscious of his power, he reverently
believed in the mission of the poet as prophet and teacher,--

"The mission of Genius on Earth! To uplift,
Purify, and confirm, by its own gracious gift,
The world,"--

and he has consecrated his gift to its noblest uses in the discharge of
that "high and holy debt".

As lover of man and nature, his sympathy was universal; no theme was too
humble f