of the troubled scene appeared to take up
and to repeat such verses as--

"'I hear a murmur as of waves
That grope their way through sunless caves,
Like bodies struggling in their graves,
Carolina!
And now it deepens; slow and grand
It swells, as rolling to the land,
An ocean broke upon the strand,
Carolina!
Shout! let it reach the startled Huns!
And roar with all thy festal guns!
It is the answer of thy sons,
Carolina!'"

Profoundly appealing as are Timrod's war strains, for they are the
heart-cry of a people, still it should be noted that there is scarcely a
battle ode that does not close with an invocation to peace, such was the
lofty nature of the poet. War to him was only the drawn sword of right,
and truth, and justice, which accomplished, the prayer for peace was
ever on his lips, as witness the noble invocation to Peace, closing his
"Christmas", that has so often stirred and hushed at once the heart of
the South.

The Ode, written for Memorial Day, April, 1867, of the Confederate
graves at Charleston, was his last production. He had sung in lofty
strains each phase of the struggle, its hope, its courage, its fear,
its despair; he now sings his latest song, a wreath of flowers upon
the unmarked graves of the Southern dead, and has hallowed these sacred
mounds to his people in the words,--

"There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!"

These poems are written in the life-blood of the poet and his
generation. The patriotic fire, the devoted sacrifice and splendid
achievement, that "Carolina", "Cry to Arms", "Unknown Dead", "Carmen
Triumphale", "Charleston", "Storm and Calm", and the other of the war
poems celebrate were not only the rushing tide of earnest feeling of a
noble people then, but are now a part of the glory and heritage of the
State, of the South, and of the American republic. They were the mighty
heart-beats of that great epoch. They are now irrevocable history, and
make these poems a part of the abiding literature of America.

"A Common Thought" is the poet's premonition of his end; but he sees
no vision of the dying glory of sunset, no going out into the dark, no
presentiment of a vague and gloomy voyage on a homeless sea; but in the
sunshine, in the growing light of ever broadening day, amid the joy an