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 God" 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 grasses and the fragrant
flowers that Nature spreads for her lover, and the winds of heaven
that breathe soft dirges over his lowly mound.

In Washington Square, Charleston, stands a monument erected in 1901 by
the Timrod Memorial Association 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 sunshine, 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 passing 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