Literary Hearthstones of Dixie Part 5

We should like to think of life as flowing on serenely in that pretty cottage on Henderson Street, Columbia, its wide front veranda crowned with a combed roof supported by a row of white columns. In its cool dimness we may in fancy see the nature-loving poet at eventide looking into the greenery of a friendly tree stretching great arms lovingly to the shadowy porch. A taller tree stands sentinel at the gate, as if to guard the poet-soul from the world and close it around with the beauty that it loved.

But life did not bring him any more of joy or success than he had achieved in the long years of toil and sorrow and disappointment, brightened by the flame of his own genius throwing upon the dark wall of existence the pictures that imagination drew with magic hand upon his sympathetic, ever responsive mind. On the sixth of October, after that month of iridescent beauty on Copse Hill, came the days of which he had written long before:

As it purples in the zenith, As it brightens on the lawn, There's a hush of death about me, And a whisper, "He is gone!"

On Copse Hill, "Under the Pine," his lifelong friend stood and sorrowfully questioned:

O Tree! have not his poet-touch, his dreams So full of heavenly gleams, Wrought through the folded dulness of thy bark, And all thy nature dark Stirred to slow throbbings, and the fluttering fire Of faint, unknown desire?

Near the end of his last visit he had told Paul Hayne that he did not wish to live to be old--"an octogenarian, far less a centenarian, like old Parr." He hoped that he might stay until he was fifty or fifty-five; "one hates the idea of a mummy, intellectual or physical."

If those coveted years had been added to his thirty-eight beautiful ones, a brighter radiance might have crowned our literature. Or, would the vision have faded away with youth?

On the seventh of October, 1867, Henry Timrod was laid to rest in Trinity Churchyard, Columbia, beside his little Willie, "the Christmas gift of G.o.d" that brought such divine light to the home only to leave it in darkness when the gift was recalled before another Christmas morn had gladdened the world. The poet's grave is marked by a shaft erected by loving hands, but a memorial more fitting to one who so loved the beautiful is found in the waving gra.s.ses and the fragrant flowers that Nature spreads for her lover, and the winds of heaven that breathe soft dirges over his lowly mound.

In Was.h.i.+ngton Square, Charleston, stands a monument erected in 1901 by the Timrod Memorial a.s.sociation of South Carolina to the memory of the most vivid poet the South has given to the world. On the west panel is an inscription which expresses to us the mainspring of his character:

Through clouds and through suns.h.i.+ne, in peace and in war, amid the stress of poverty and the storms of civil strife, his soul never faltered and his purpose never failed. To his poetic mission he was faithful to the end. In life and in death he was "not disobedient unto the Heavenly vision."

On the panel facing the War Monument are three stanzas from his own beautiful Ode, sung at the decoration of Confederate graves in Magnolia Cemetery in 1867--such a little time before his pa.s.sing that it seems to have mournful, though unconscious, allusion to his own early fall in the heat of earth's battle:

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.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!

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

The shaft which the prophetic eye of Timrod saw "in the stone" was in time revealed, and years later that other shaft, awaiting the hour for doing homage to the poet, found the light. To-day the patriot soldiers asleep in Magnolia, and their poet alike, have stately testimonials of the loving memory of their people.

[Note: The quotations from Henry Timrod found in this book are used by special permission of the B.F. Johnson Publis.h.i.+ng Company, the authorized publishers of Timrod's Poems.]

"FATHER ABBOT"

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS

Woodlands, near Midway, the half-way stop between Charleston and Augusta, was a little kingdom of itself in the years of its greatness when William Gilmore Simms was monarch of the fair domain. It was far from being a monastery, though its master was known as "Father Abbot."

The t.i.tle had clung to him from the pseudonym under which he had written a series of letters to a New York paper, upholding the view that Charlestonians should not go north on health-seeking vacations when they had better places nearer home, mentioning Sullivan's Island where the hospitable Fort Moultrie officers "were good hands at drawing a cork." Of course, he meant a trigger.

Rather was Woodlands a bit of enchanted forest cut from an old black-letter legend, in which one half expected to meet mediaeval knights on foaming steeds--every-day folk ride jogging horses--threading their way through the mysterious forest aisles in search of those romantic adventures which were necessary to give knights of that period an excuse for existence. It chanced, however, that the only knights known to Woodlands were the old-time friends of its master and the youthful writers who looked to "Father Abbot" for literary guidance.

Having welcomed his guests with the warmth and urbanity which made him a most enjoyable comrade, Father Abbot would disperse them to seek entertainment after the manner agreeable to them. For the followers of old Isaac Walton there was prime fis.h.i.+ng in the Edisto River, that "sweet little river" that ripples melodiously through "Father Abbot's"

pages. To hunters the forest offered thrilling occupation. For the pleasure rider smooth, white, sandy bridle-paths led in silvery curves through forests of oak or pine to the most delightful of Nowheres.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WOODLANDS, THE HOME OF WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS By courtesy of D. Appleton & Company]

Having put each guest into the line of his fancy, the master of Woodlands would betake himself to his library to write his thirty pages, the daily stint he demanded from the loom of his imagination.

Sometimes he had a companion in Paul Hayne who, not so much given to outdoor life as many of the frequenters of Woodlands, liked to sit in the library, weaving some poetic vision of his own or watching the flight of the tireless pen across the page.

By and by the pen would drop upon the desk, its task finished for that morning, and the worker would look up with an air of surprise at becoming aware of his companion and say: "Near dinner time, old boy.

What do you say to a sherry and soda?" As there was only one thing to be said to a sherry and soda, this was the signal for repairing to the dining room. By the time the sherry and soda sparkled hospitable welcome the sportsmen returned and after doing justice to the genius of the host in mixed drinks, they were seated around a generous table, most of the good things with which it was laden having come from the waters and fields and vines of Woodlands. For if a world-wide war had closed all the harbors of earth Woodlands could still have offered luxurious banquets to its guests. The host beguiled the time with anecdotes, of which he had an unfailing store that never lost a point in his telling, or declaimed poetry, of which his retentive memory held an inexhaustible collection.

The feast was followed by cigars, Simms having begun to smoke of late years to discourage a tendency to stoutness. Then all would join in the diversions of the afternoon, which sometimes led to the "Edge of the Swamp," a gruesome place which the poet of Woodlands had celebrated in his verse. Here

Cypresses, Each a great, ghastly giant, eld and gray Stride o'er the dusk, dank tract.

Around the sombre cypress trees coiled

Fantastic vines That swing like monstrous serpents in the sun.

There are living snakes in the swamp, yet more terrifying than the viny serpents that circle the cypresses, and

The steel-jaw'd cayman from his gra.s.sy slope Slides silent to the slimy, green abode Which is his province.

Now and then a bit of sunny, poetic life touches upon the gloomy place, for

See! a b.u.t.terfly That, travelling all the day, has counted climes Only by flowers ...

Lights on the monster's brow.

An insecure perch for the radiant wanderer. The inhospitable saurian dives with embarra.s.sing suddenness and dips the airy visitor into the "rank water." The b.u.t.terfly finds no charm in the gloomy place and flies away, which less ethereal wanderers might likewise be fain to do. Now and then the stillness that reigned over that home of malign things was broken by the sound of a boat-horn on a lumber raft floating down the Edisto.

A song written by Simms chants the charms of a grapevine swing in the festoons of which half a dozen guests could be seated at once, all on different levels, book in one hand, leaving the other free to reach up and gather the cl.u.s.ters of grapes as they read. After supper they sat on the portico, from which they looked through a leafy archway formed by the meeting of the branches of magnificent trees, and discussed literature and metaphysics.

The Christmas guests at Woodlands would be awakened in early morning by the sound of voice and banjo and, looking from their windows, could see the master distributing gifts to his seventy dusky servitors. In the evenings host and guests met in the s.p.a.cious dining room where Simms would brew a punch of unparalleled excellence, he being as famous for the concoction of that form of gayety as was his friend, Jamison, down the river, for the evolution of the festive c.o.c.ktail.

Life flowed on pleasantly at Woodlands from October till May in those idyllic years before death had made a graveyard of the old home and fire had swept away the beautiful mansion.

William Gilmore Simms first opened his eyes upon the world of men in Charleston, at a time when to be properly born in Charleston meant to be born to the purple. William Gilmore, alas! did not inherit that imperial color. He sprang from the good red earth, whence comes the vigor of humanity, and dwelt in the rugged atmosphere of toil which the Charleston eye could never penetrate. Politically, the City by the Sea led the van in the hosts of Democracy; ethically, she remained far in the rear with the Divine Right of Kings and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Aristocracy.

So Charleston took little note of the boy whose father failed in trade and fared forth to fight British and Indians under Old Hickory and to wander in that far Southwest known as Mississippi to ascertain whether that remote frontier might offer a livelihood to the unfortunate. The small William Gilmore, left in the care of his grandmother, was apprenticed to a druggist and became a familiar figure on the streets of Charleston as he came and went on his round of errands. Small wonder that the Queen of the Sea, having swallowed his pills and powders in those early days, had little taste for his literary output in after years.

In Charleston he not only learned the drug business, but took his first course in the useful art of deception, reading and writing verses by the light of a candle concealed in a box, to hide its rays from his thrifty grandmother, who was adverse not only to the waste of candles but to the squandering of good sleep-time.

Fortunately, she had no objection to furnis.h.i.+ng him with entertainment in off hours. For the material of much of his work in after life was he indebted to the war stories and ancient traditions that she told her eager little grandson in those 'prentice days. But for her olden tales, the romances of Revolutionary South Carolina and the s.h.i.+very fascination of "Dismal Castle" might have been unknown to future readers.

All the region around Charleston, so rich in historic memories, was an inspiration to the future romance writer. The aged trees festooned with heavy gray moss lent him visions of the past to reappear in many a volume. In his boat in Charleston harbor, and on the sands looking out over the ocean, he gathered that collection of sea pictures which adorned his prose and verse in the years to come.

Over on Morris Island glowed the Charleston light, "the pale, star-like beacon, set by the guardian civilization on the edges of the great deep." Lying on the sh.o.r.e he watched "the swarthy beauty, Night, enveloped in dark mantle, pa.s.sing with all her train of starry servitors; even as some queenly mourner, followed by legions of gay and brilliant courtiers, glides slowly and mournfully in sad state and solemnity on a duteous pilgrimage to some holy shrine." He saw "over the watery waste that sad, sweet, doubtful light, such as Spenser describes in the cathedral wood: 'A little glooming light, most like a shade.'" Drifting about in his boat he might pa.s.s Long Island, where in 1776 the ocean herself fought for Charleston, interposing an impa.s.sable barrier to the advance of Sir Henry Clinton.

While sea and sh.o.r.e and sky and earth were giving him of their best, his father came back with innumerable stories of adventure that would of themselves have set up a young romancer in business. Having talked his mind dry of experiences he returned to Mississippi to make another collection of thrilling tales, leaving William Gilmore, Jr., with a mental outlook upon life which the glories of Charleston could never have opened to him.

Drugs, considered as a lifelong pursuit, did not appeal to the youth who had been writing verses ever since he had arrived at the age of eight years and now held a place in the poet's corner of a Charleston paper. He went into the law office of his friend, Charles E. Carroll, where his perusal of Blackstone was interspersed with reading poetry and writing Byronic verses.

While thus variously engaged he received an invitation to visit his father in the wilds of Mississippi, a call to which his adventurous spirit gave willing response. Were there not Indians and other wild things and the choicest a.s.sortment of the odds and ends of humanity out there, just waiting to be made useful as material for the pen of an ambitious romancer? Through untrodden forests he rode in a silence broken only by his horse's feet and the howl of wolves in the distance. To all the new views of the world he kept open the windows of his mind and they were transmitted to his readers in the years to come. If he did not sleep with head pillowed upon the grave of one of De Soto's faithful followers, he at least thought he did, and the fancy served him as the theme of verse. And those varying types of human nature and beast nature--do they not all appear again upon the printed page?