Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne :: :: University of Virginia Library

Ay, it is well! Crush back your selfish tears;
For from the half-veiled face of earthly spring
Hath he not risen on heaven-aspiring wing
To reach the spring-tide of the eternal years?

With life full-orbed, he stands amid his peers,
The grand immortals! a fair, mild-eyed king,
Flushing to hear their potent welcomes ring
Round the far circle of those luminous spheres.

Mock not his heavenly cheer with mortal wail,
Unless some human-hearted nightingale,
Pierced by grief's thorn, shall give such music birth
That he, the new-winged soul, the crowned and shriven,
May lean beyond the effulgent verge of heaven,
To catch his own sweet requiem, borne from earth!

Such marvellous requiem were a pæan too—
(Woe touched and quivering with triumphant fire);
For him whose course flashed always high and higher,
Is lost beyond the strange, mysterious blue:
Ah! yet, we murmur, can this thing be true?
Forever silent here, that tender lyre,
Tuned to all gracious themes, all pure desire,
Whose notes dropped sweet as honey, soft as dew?
No tears! you say—since rounded, brave, complete,
The poet's work lies radiant at God's feet.
Nay! nay! our hearts with grief must hold their tryst:
How dim grows all about us and above!
Vainly we grope through death's bewildering mist,
To feel once more his clasp of human love!

II.
ON THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD.

I see the Nation, as in antique ages,
Crouched with rent robes, and ashes on her head:
Her mournful eyes are deep with dark presages,
Her soul is haunted by a formless dread!

“O God!” she cries, “why hast Thou left me bleeding,
Wounded and quivering to the heart's hot core?
Can fervid faith, winged prayer, and anguished pleading
Win balm and pity from thy heavens no more?

“I knelt, I yearned, in agonizing passion,
Breathless to catch thy ‘still small voice’ from far;
Now thou hast answered, but in awful fashion,
And stripped our midnight of its last pale star.

“What tears are given me in o'ermastering measure,
From fathomless floods of Marah, darkly free,
While that pure life I held my noblest treasure
Is plunged forever in death's tideless sea!

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“Hark to those hollow sounds of lamentation,
The muffled music, the funereal bell;
From far and wide on wings of desolation
Float wild and wailful voices of farewell.

“The North-land mourns her grief in full libation,
Outpoured for him who died at victory's goal;
And the great West, in solemn ministration,
May not recall her hero's shining soul.

“Yea, the North mourns; the West; a stricken mother,
Droops as in sackcloth with veiled brow and mouth;
And what old strifes, what waning hates, can smother
The generous heart-throbs of the pitying South?

“Did doubt remain?—She crushed its latest ember
At that stern moment when the victim's fall
Changed loveliest summer to a grim December,
Paled by the hiss of Guiteau's murderous ball.

“Thus by the spell of one vast grief united
(Where cypress boughs their death-cold shadows wave),
My sons, I trust, a holier faith have plighted,
And sealed the compact by his sacred grave.”

'Twas thus she spoke; but still in prostrate sorrow,
While lowlier earthward drooped her brow august.
To-day is dark; vague darkness clouds to-morrow.
Ah! in God's hand the nations are but—dust!

III.
DEAN STANLEY.

Dead! dead! in sooth his marbled brow is cold,
And prostrate lies that brave, majestic head;
True! his stilled features own death's arctic mould,
Yet, by Christ's blood, I know he is not dead!

Here fades the cast-off vestment that he wore,
The robe of flesh, whence his true self hath fled;
Whate'er be false, one faith holds fast and sure,
Great souls like his abide not with the dead:

Eyried with God, beyond all mortal pain,
Breathing the effluence of ethereal birth,
Through deeds divine, his spirit walks again,
On rhythmic feet the mournful paths of earth!

In heaven immortal, yet on earth supreme,
The glamour of his goodness still survives,
Not in vain glimpses of a flattering dream,
But flower and fruit of ransomed human lives.

His hopes were ocean-wide, and clasped mankind;
No Levite plea his mercy turned apart,
But wounded souls—to whom all else were blind—
He soothed with wine and balsam of the heart.

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With stainless hands he reared his Master's cross;
His Master's watchword pealed o'er land and sea;
And still through days of gain, and days of loss,
Proclaimed the golden truce of charity.

All men were brethren to his larger creed,
But given the thought sincere—the earnest aim;
God's garden will not spurn the humblest weed
That yearns for purer air and loftier flame.

This sweet evangel of the unborn years,
Seer-like he spake, as one that viewed his goal,
While the world felt through darkness and through tears,
Mysterious music thrill its raptured soul.

Dead! nay, not dead! while eagle thoughts aspire,
Clothed in winged deeds across the empyreal height,
And all the expanding space is flushed with fire,
And deep on deep, heaven opens to our sight,—

He cannot die! yet o'er his dust we shed
Our rain of human sorrow; on his breast
Cross the pale palms; and pulseless heart and head
Leave to the quiet of his cloistered rest.

Sleep, knightly scholar! warrior-saint, repose!
Thy life-force folded like an unfurled sail!
Spent is time's rage—its foam of crested woes—
And thou hast found, at last, the Holy Grail!

IV.
HIRAM H. BENNER.

[Dedicated to the Wife of this Hero and Martyr.]

When the war-drums beat and the trumpets blare,
When banners flaunt in the stormy air,
When at thought of the deeds that must soon be done,
The hearts of a thousand leap up as one,
Who could not rush through the din and smoke,
The cannon's crash and the sabre stroke,
Scarce conscious of ebbing blood or breath,
With a laugh for wounds and a scoff at death?

But when on the sullen breeze there comes
No thrill of trumpets nor throb of drums,
But only the wail of the sick laid low
By the treacherous blight of a viewless foe—
Who, then, will upgird his loins for fight
With the loathsome pest in the poisoned night,
No martial music his pulse to start,
But the still, small voice of the ruthful heart?
Who then? Behold him, the calm, the brave,
On his billowy path to an alien grave!
Serene in the charm of his God-like will,
This soldier is armored to save, not kill.
Ah! swiftly he speeds on the mist-bound stream
This pilgrim wrapped in his tender dream,
His vision of help for the sick laid low
By the evil spell of an ambushed foe.

Ah! swiftly he speeds 'mid the hollow boom
Of bells that are tolling to death and doom,

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Till even the sounds of the bells grow still;
For the hands of their ringers are lax and chill.
And the hum of the mourners is heard no more
On the misty slope and the vacant shore,
And the few frail creatures that greet him seem
But the ghosts of men by a phantom stream.

Still the hero his own great soul enticed
To suffer and toil in the name of Christ,
He follows wherever his Lord had led,
To the famished hut or the dying bed.
He medicines softly the fevered pain;
To the starving he bringeth his golden grain;
And ever before him and ever above
Is the sheen of the unfurled wings of love.

Meanwhile, in his distant home are those
That his going has robbed of their sweet repose.
The days pass by them like leaden years;
The nights are bitter with tears and fears—
Till at last, by the lightning glamour sped,
Comes a name and date, with the one word, “Dead!”
And the arms of the smitten are lifted high,
And the heavens are rent by an anguished cry!

Dead! dead! Vain word for the wise to hear!
How false its echo on heart and ear!
To the earth and earth's he may close his eyes,
But who dares tell us a martyr dies?
And of him just gone it were best to say
That in some charmed hour of night or day—
Having given us all that his soul could give—
Brave Hiram Benner began to live.

V.
W. GILMORE SIMMS.

A POEM

[_]

Delivered on the night of the 13th of December, 1877 “at the Charlestown Academy of Music,” as prologue to the “Dramatic Entertainment” in aid of the “Simms Memorial fund.”

The swift mysterious seasons rise and set;
The omnipotent years pass o'er us, bright or dun;—
Dawns blush, and mid-days burn, 'till scarce aware
Of what deep meaning haunts our twilight air,
We pause bewildered, yearning for the sun;
Only to find in that strange evening-tide,
By the last sunset pathos sanctified,
Pale memory near us, and divine regret!

Then memory gently takes us by the hand;
And doubtful boundaries of a faded time,
Half veiled in mist and rime,
Emerge, grow bright, expand;
The past becomes the present to our eyes;
Poor slaves of dust and death,
(As if some trump of resurrection clear
Somewhere outpealed, our senses could not hear)
Rise, freed from churchyard taint and mortal stain;
Old friends! dear comrades! have we met again?
God! how these dismal years
Of anguished desolation, and veiled tears,
Of fettered feeling, and despondent sighs,
Wither and shrivel like a parchment scroll

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Seized by the fury of consuming fire,
Before the rapture of the illumined soul,
Lifted and lightened by our love's desire!

Old friends! dear comrades! have we met once more?
Come! let us fondly mark
In this weird truce, whose moments soon must flee,
'Twixt the charmed heart and dread reality,
Those well-belovéd features that ye wore
Once on this earthly shore,
Now rescued from the void and treacherous dark!
O! faces soft or strong,
Familiar faces! how ye press and throng
Closely about us, while the enchanted light
Changes to noonday our long spiritual night!
The faithful eyes that beamed in ours of yore,
Shine on us in their ancient guileless way,
Undimmed, unshorn of one beneficent ray,
And vital seeming as our own, to-day;
Lips smile, as once they smiled with innocent zest,
When round the social board
The impetuous flood-tide poured
Of curbless mirth, and keen sparkling jest
Vanished like wine-foam on its golden crest!
We feel the loyal grasp
Of many a warm hand, yielding clasp for clasp;
But may not stay, alas! we may not stay
To greet ye one by one,
Comrades! returned from realms beyond the sun;
For lo! in rightful precedence of power,
“A Saul amongst his brethren,” than the rest
Loftier, if ruder in his natural might,
The man who toiled through fortune's bitterest hour,
As calmly steadfast and supremely brave,
As if above a fair life's tranquil wave,
Brooded the halcyon with unruffled breast;
The man whose sturdy frame upheld aright,
We meet, (O friends), to consecrate to-night!

All pregnant powers that wait
On intellectual state,
Favored and loved him; earliest, dearest came
Imagination, robed in mystical flame;
Her clear eyes searching all created things
Heavenly and earthly; with vast breadth of wings
Engirdled by the magic of a spell ineffable;
And like the sportive nymph of woodland bowers,
Fancy stole on him coyly, pranked with flowers,
Whereof the fairest her white fingers shed,
To crown his bended head.
Bluff humor true, if broad,
Placed in his hand a mirth-evoking rod,
While satire, from the heights of reason proud,
Flashed a keen gleam, like lightning from a cloud
The levin-bolt so sheerly cuts in two,
The cloud disparts, to leave—a luminous blue!

All that he was, all that he owned, we know
Was lavished freely on one sacred shrine,
The shrine of home and country! from the first
Fresh blush of youth, when merged in sanguine glow,

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His life-path seemed a shadowless steep to shine,
Leading forever upward to the stars;
Through many a desperate and embittered strife
That raging, rose and burst
Above the storm-wracked waste of middle-life.
Down to the day, a few sad years ago,
When a grave veteran with his age's scars,
He moved among us, like a Titan maimed;
Only one glorious goal,
Through fate, grief, change, the pure allegiance claimed
Of his unconquered and majestic soul;
The goal of honor; not that he might rise
Alone and dominant; but that all men's eyes
Might view, perchance through much brave toil of his,
His country stripped of every filthy weed
Of crime imputed; in thought, word and deed,
A noble people, none would dare despise
In their unsullied Palingenesis,
(Which he with blissful awe,
And all a poet's prescient faith foresaw;)
A noble people, o'er their subject-lands
Ruling with constant hearts and stainless hands;
Their feet firm planted as McGregor's were,
Deep in the herbage of their native sod,
And every honest forehead free to rear
A front unquelled by fear,
Untouched by shame, unfurrowed by despair,—
High in man's sight, or bowed alone to God!

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So, let us rear the shaft, and poise the bust
Above the mouldering, but ah! priceless dust
Of vanished genius! Let our homage be
Large as that splendid prodigality
Of force and love, wherewith he stanchly wrought
Out from the quarries of his own deep thought,
Unnumbered shapes; whether of good or ill,
No puny puppets whose false action frets
On a false stage, like feeble Marionettes;
But life-like, human still;
Types of a by-gone age of crime and lust;
Or, grand historic forms, in whom we view
Re-vivified, and re-created stand,
The braves who strove through cloud-encompassed ways,
Infinite travail, and malign dispraise,
To guard, to save, to wrench from tyrant hordes,
By the pen's virtue, or the lordlier sword's
Unravished Liberty,
The virgin huntress on a virgin strand!

I, through whose song your hearts have spoken to-night,
Soul-present with you, yet am far away;
Outside my exile's home, I watch the sway
Of the bowed pine-tops in the gloaming gray,
Casting across the melancholy lea,
A tint of browner blight;
Outside my exile's home, borne to and fro,
I hear the inarticulate murmurs flow
Of the faint wind-tides breathing like a sea;
When, in clear vision, softly dawns on me,
(As if in contrast with yon slow decay),
The loveliest land that smiles beneath the sky,
The coast-land of our Western Italy;
I view the waters quivering; quaff the breeze,
Whose briny raciness keeps an under taste
Of flavorous tropic sweets (perchance swept home,
Across the flickering waste
Of summer waves, capped by the Ariel foam),
From Cuba's perfumed groves, and garden spiceries!

Along the horizon-line a vapor swims,
Pale rose and amethyst, melting into gold;
Up to our feet the fawning ripples rolled,
Glimmer an instant, tremble, lapse, and die;
The whole rare scene, its every element
Etherealized, transmuted subtly, blent
By viewless alchemy,
Into the glory of a golden mood,
Brings potent exaltations, while I walk,
(A joyful youth again),
The snow-white beaches by the Atlantic Main!
Ah! not alone! the carking curse of Time
Far from him yet; his bold hopes unsubdued
By the long anguish of the woes to be,
Midmost his years, in mellow-hearted prime,
Beside me stands our stalwart-statured Simms!

See! what a Viking's mien!
Half tawny locks in careless masses curled
Over his ample forehead's massive dome!
Eyes of bold outlook, that sometimes beneath
Their level-fronted brows, shine lambent, deep,
With inspirations scarce aroused from sleep;

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And sometimes rife with ire,
Sent forth as sword-blades from an unbared sheath,
Flashes of sudden fire!
His whole air breathes of combat, unserene
Profounds of feeling, by a scornful world
Too early stirred to impotent disdains;
Generous withal; bound by all liberal ties
Of lordly-natured magnanimities;
Whereof we mark the sign
In the curved fullness of a mobile mouth,
Almost voluptuous; hinting of the south,
Whose suns high summer shed through all his veins:
Blending the mildness of a cordial grace
With sterner traits of his Berserker face,
Firm-set as granite, haughty, leonine.

No prim Precisian he! his fluent talk
Roved thro' all topics, vivifying all;
Now deftly ranging level plains of thought,
To sink, anon in metaphysical deeps;
Whence, by caprice of strange transition brought
Outward and upward, the free current sought
Ideal summits, gathering in its course,
Splendid momentum and imperious force,
Till, down it rushed as mighty cataracts fall,
Hurled from gaunt mountain steeps!

Sportive he could be as a gamesome boy!
By heaven! as 'twere but yesterday, I see
His tall frame quake with throes of jollity;
Hear his rich voice that owned a jovial tone,
Jocund as Falstaff's own;
And catch moist glints of steel-blue eyes o'errun
Sideways, by tiny rivulets of fun!
Alas! this vivid vision slowly fades!
Its serious beauty, and its flush of joy
Pass into nothingness! ... Stern Death resumes
His sombre empire in the dusk of tombs;
And the deep umbrage of the cypress glades
Is wanly, coldly cast
In lengthening gloom o'er the reburied past!
What then? the spirit of him
We mourn and fain would honor, grows not dim;
On earth will live with consummated toil
Worthily wrought, despite the hot turmoil
Of open enmity, the secret guile,
That mole-like burrowed 'neath the fruitful soil
Of his broad mental acres, but to show
Marks of its crawling littleness between,
Each far-extended row
Of those hale harvests, glittering gold or green!

And somewhere, somewhere in the infinite space,
Like all true souls by our Soul-Father prized,
It dwells forever individualized;
No ghost bewildered 'midst a “No Man's Land;”
Outlawed and banned
Of fair identity's redeeming grace,
Shivering before its wretched phantom self,
Marred by Lethean moonshine—a pale elf,
A passionless shadow, but in mind and heart,
The mortal creature's marvellous counterpart;
Only exalted, nobler; down on us
Gazing thro' fathomless ethers luminous;
Watching the earth and earth-ways from afar,

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Perhaps with somewhat of a scornful smile;
Yet tempered by the tolerance which beseems
One long translated from our sphere of dreams,
Hollow illusions, vacant vanities,
To that vast actual, which beyond us lies,
Where who may guess? midst yonder opulent skies;
Clear “coigns of vantage,” in some deathless star!

VI.
DICKENS.

Methinks the air
Throbs with the tolling of harmonious bells,
Rung by the hands of spirits; everywhere
We feel the presence of a soft despair
And thrill to voices of divine farewells.

Sweet Fancy lost,
Wandering in darkness, now makes silvery moan;
While Pathos, pale, and shadowy, like a ghost,
Sobs upon Humor's breast, that mourns him most,
The wizard king who leaves them all—alone.

Wan genii throng,
From earth's four quarters hurrying, mount and mart,
Pure woodland peace, the city's din and wrong,
Each breathing low a fond funereal song,
Each sadly bowed o'er that grand, silent heart.

The children's tears
Mingle with manhood's woe, that falls like rain;
Low lieth one who towered above his peers,
And nevermore, through all the fruitful years,
Our eyes shall greet the master's like again.

Creations fine,
His prodigal offspring, crowd so thickly round
That Wit falls foul of Sorrow, Cupids twine
Warm arms with Avarice, and Love's strength divine
Hath vanquished Hate on Hate's own chosen ground.

Though gone, his art
Triumphant spans the threatening clouds of death;
Its rainbow hues forever pulse and start,
Steeped in the life-blood of the human heart,
And woven on heavens beyond Time's stormy breath.

VII.
TO BAYARD TAYLOR BEYOND US.

A VISION OF CHRISTMAS EVE, 1878.

As here within I watch the fervid coals,
While the chill heavens without shine wanly white,
I wonder, friend! in what rare realm of souls,
You hail the uprising Christmas-tide to-night!

I leave the fire-place, lift the curtain's fold,
And peering past these shadowy window-bars,
See through broad rifts of ghostly clouds unrolled,
The pulsing pallor of phantasmal stars.

Phantoms they seem, glimpsed through the clouded deep,
Till the winds cease, and cloudland's ghastly glow

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Gives place above to luminous calms of sleep,
Beneath, to glittering amplitudes of snow!

Some stars like steely bosks on blazoned shields,
Stud constellations measureless in might;
Some lily-pale, make fair the ethereal fields,
In which, O friend, art thou ensphered to-night?

Where'er mid yonder infinite worlds it be,
Its souls, I know, are clothed with wings of fire;
How wouldst thou scorn even Immortality,
In whose dull rest thou couldst not still aspire!

There, Homer raised where genius cannot nod,
Hears the orbed thunders of celestial seas;
And Shakespeare, lofty almost as a God,
Smiles his large smile at Aristophanes;

With earth's supremest souls, still grouped apart,
Great souls made perfect in the eternal noon,
There thy loved Goethe holds thee to his heart,
Re-born to youth and all life's chords in tune.

While in the liberal air of that wide heaven,
He whispers: “Come! we share the self-same height;
To me on earth thy noblest toils were given,
Brothers, henceforth, we walk these paths of light.”

Clear and more clear the radiant vision gleams!
More bright grand shapes and glorious faces grow;
While like deep fugues of victory, heard in dreams,
A thousand heavenly clarions seem to blow!

VIII.
BAYARD TAYLOR (UPON DEATH).

[_]

“More than once I have met death, but without fear! Nor do I fear now! Without being able to demonstrate it, I know that my soul cannot die ... Indeed, to me the infinite is more comprehensible than the finite!”

These words occur in a letter of Bayard Taylor's to me, written not many weeks before his death. They have suggested the following sonnet:—

“Oft have I fronted Death, nor feared his might!
To me immortal, this dim Finite seems
Like some waste low-land, crossed by wandering streams
Whose clouded waves scarce catch our yearning sight:
Clearer by far, the imperial Infinite!
Though its ethereal radiance only gleams
In exaltations of majestic dreams,
Such dreams portray God's heaven of heavens aright!”
Thou blissful Faith! that on death's imminent brink
Thus much of heaven's mysterious truth hast told!
Soul-life aspires, though all the stars should sink;
Not vain our loftiest instinct's upward stress,
Nor hath the immortal hope shone clear and bold,
To quench at death, his torch in nothingness!

IX.
RICHARD H. DANA, SEN.

O deep grave eyes! that long have seemed to gaze
On our low level from far loftier days,
O grand gray head! an aureole seemed to gird,
Drawn from the spirit's pure, immaculate rays!

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At length death's signal sounds! From weary eyes
Pass the pale phantoms of our earth and skies;
The gray head droops; the museful lips are closed
On life's vain questionings and more vain replies!

Like some gaunt oak wert thou, that lonely stands
'Mid fallen trunks in outworn desert lands;
Still sound at core, with rhythmic leaves that stir
To soft swift touches of aerial hands.

Ah! long we viewed thee thus, forlornly free,
In that dead grove the sole unravished tree;
Lo! the dark axe man smites! the oak lies low
That towered in lonely calm o'er land and sea!

X.
BRYANT DEAD!

Lo! there he lies, our Patriarch Poet, dead!
The solemn angel of eternal peace
Has waved a wand of mystery o'er his head,
Touched his strong heart, and bade his pulses cease.

Behold in marble quietude he lies!
Pallid and cold, divorced from earthly breath,
With tranquil brow, lax hands, and dreamless eyes,
Yet the closed lips would seem to smile at death.

Well may they smile; for death, to such as he,
Brings purer freedom, loftier thought and aim;
And, in grand truce with immortality,
Lifts to song's fadeless heaven his star-like fame!

XI.
THE POLE OF DEATH.

IN MEMORY OF SIDNEY LANIER.

How solemnly on mournful eyes
The mystic warning rose,
While o'er the Singer's forehead lies
A twilight of repose.

The twilight deepens into night,—
That night of frozen breath,
The rigor of whose Arctic blight,
We recognize as—death!

But since beyond the polar ice
May shine bright baths of balm;
Past its grim barriers' last device,
A crystal-hearted calm,—

Thus, ice-bound Death that guards so well
His far-off, secret goal,
May clasp a peace ineffable,
For some who reach his pole!

My poet—is it thus with thee,
Beyond this twilight gray,—
This frozen blight, this sombre sea,—
Ah! hast thou found the Day?

XII.
THE DEATH OF HOOD.

The maimed and broken warrior lay,
By his last foeman brought to bay.

No sounds of battlefield were there—
The drum's deep bass, the trumpet's blare.

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No lines of swart battalions broke
Infuriate, thro' the sulphurous smoke.

But silence held the tainted room
An ominous hush, an awful gloom,

Save when, with feverish moan, he stirred,
And dropped some faint, half-muttered word,

Or outlined in vague, shadowy phrase,
The changeful scenes of perished days!

What thoughts on his bewildered brain,
Must then have flashed their blinding pain!

The past and future, blent in one,—
Wild chaos round life's setting sun.

But most his spirit's yearning gaze
Was fain to pierce the future's haze,

And haply view what fate should find
The tender loves he left behind.

“O God! outworn, despondent, poor,
I tarry at death's opening door,

While subtlest ties of sacred birth
Still bind me to the lives of earth.

How can I in calm courage die,
Thrilled by the anguish of a cry

I know from orphaned lips shall start
Above a father's pulseless heart?”

His eyes, by lingering languors kissed,
Shone like sad stars thro' autumn mist;

And all his being felt the stress
Of helpless passion's bitterness.

When, from the fever-haunted room,
The prescient hush, the dreary gloom,

A blissful hope divinely stole
O'er the vexed waters of his soul,

That sank as sank that stormy sea,
Subdued by Christ in Galilee.

It whispered low, with smiling mouth,
“She is not dead,—thy queenly South.

And since for her each liberal vein
Lavished thy life, like vintage rain,

When round the bursting wine-press meet
The Ionian harvesters' crimsoned feet;

And since for her no galling curb
Could bind thy patriot will superb.

Yea! since for her thine all was spent,
Unmeasured, with a grand content,—

Soldier, thine orphaned ones shall rest,
Serene, on her imperial breast.

Her faithful arms shall be their fold,
In summer's heat, in winter's cold;

And her proud beauty melt above
Their weakness in majestic love!”

Ah! then the expiring hero's face,
Like Stephen's, glowed with rapturous grace.

Mad missiles of a morbid mood,
Hurled at his heart in solitude,

No longer wounding, round it fell;
Peace sweetened his supreme farewell!

For sure the harmonious hope was true,
O South! he leaned his faith on you!

And in clear vision, ere he died,
Saw its pure promise justified.

During the terrible yellow fever season of 1878, General Hood and his wife died at very nearly the same time. They left a large family of children unprovided for, under circumstances which aroused the sympathy of the public, north and south. At the South, a considerable fund was subsequently raised for their support; while northern philanthropists, we understand, adopted two of the children.