You are here
قراءة كتاب Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Volume I (of 14)
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Volume I (of 14)
class="c1">The blessed, happy years—
When plough-shares shall be made of swords,
And pruning hooks of spears!
The lines on Sheridan and Butler express something more than the poet's righteous indignation at deeds by them in which he can somehow see neither virtue nor valor. As indicative of the feelings of the South in the hour of final defeat and subjugation read "Daughters of Southland" and "My Motherland." One stanza of the first must suffice:
Their glory's priceless gem
Nor peace, nor war can ever mar;
There is no change for them.
Rejoice! for tho the conqueror's hate
Still beats upon our head,
Despite our chains there yet remains
The memory of our dead.
How tender and ardent is the patriotism in these lines:
Though dust is on thy brow,
And sack-cloth wraps thy beauteous form,
I love thee better now
Than when, arrayed in robes of power,
Thou send'st thy legions forth
To battle with the hosts that poured.
From out the mighty North.
My motherland! my motherland!
Thy bravest and thy best,
Beneath the sod their life-blood stained,
In dreamless slumber rest;
Thrice happy dead! They cannot hear
Thy low, sad wail of woe;
The taunts thy living sons must bear
They are not doomed to know.
My motherland! my motherland!
Their spirits whisper me,
And bid me in thy days of grief
Still closer cling to thee,
And though the hopes we cherished once
With them have found a grave,
I love thee yet, my motherland—
The land they died to save.
Whether he spoke for his section in these disdainful and defiant lines, descriptive of times just after the war, each may decide for himself:
In the furnace red of hell;
Call to your aid the venomed skill
Of "all the fiends that fell,"
And forge new links for the galling chain
To bind the prostrate South again.
Stir up again your snarling pack
Your jackals black and white,
That tear her lovely form by day,
And gnaw her bones by night—
Your sniveling thieves with carpet bags—
Your sneaking, whining scalawags!
Villains, go on; each blow you strike
To glut your hellish hate,
But welds in one all Southern hearts,
And state unites to state;
And lo, compact our Southland stands—
A nation fashioned by your hands.
But it is in the poems personal and descriptive that we get close to this poet's heart. There will be found what gave most solace to his circumscribed and lonely life. In nature as she was most attractive to him, and in lines to loved ones young and old, plaintive often but never rebellious or morose, the placid, self-restrained, yet inspiring nature of the man is brought to clearest view. Fervid in his love for beauty, he bowed none the less devoutly at the shrine of duty.
"The Old School House," "The Deserted Home," "Autumn," "The Frost and the Forest," "My Castle," "Lines on the Death of My Father," "My Old Home," and the last poem "Unfinished," are representative of the class that best reflects the poet and the man; and by their pensive beauty perhaps take firmest hold upon the reader. It is difficult to offer satisfactory illustrations without being too lengthy; but these will prove at least suggestive:
The budding glories of the early spring,—
Its gay sweet-scented flowers and verdant trees
That graceful bend before the western breeze.
Be mine the task to chant in humble rhyme
The lovely autumn of our own bright Southern clime.
No more the sun from the zenith high,
With fiery tongue licks brook and riv'let dry;
But from beyond the equinoctial line—
Where crystal waters lave the golden mine—
Aslant on earth he pours his mellow beams,
Soft as the memories which light old age's dreams.
The following poem can be given entire, as it is short:
Came with jewels of silver sheen—
To woo by the spinster Dian's light,
The pride of the South—the Forest Queen.
He wooed till morn, and he went away;
Then I heard the Forest faintly sigh,
And she blushed like a girl on her wedding day,
And her blush grew deeper as time went by.
Alas, for the Forest! the cunning Frost
Her ruin sought, when he came to woo;
She moans all day her glory lost,
And her blush has changed to a death-like hue.
Perhaps Mr. Berryhill's best known poem is one that is personal and yet quite fanciful. It can be found in Miss Clarke's "Songs of the South." Two or three stanzas will be sufficient:
And round my brow has never twined the laurel wreath of fame—
They do not know that I possess a castle old and grand,
With many an acre broad attached of fair and fertile land;
With hills and dales, and lakes and streams, and fields of waving grain,
And snowy flocks, and lowing herds, that browse upon the plain.
In sooth, it is a good demesne—how would my scorners stare,
Could they behold the splendors of my castle in the air!
The room in which I am sitting now is smoky, bare and cold,
But I have gorgeous, stately chambers in my palace old.
Rich paintings by the grand old masters hang upon the wall
And marble busts and statues stand around the spacious hall.
A chandelier of silver pure, and golden lamps illume,
With rosy light, on festal nights the great reception room.
When wisdom, genius, beauty, wit, are all assembled there,
And strains of sweetest music fill my castle in the air.
The banks may break, and stocks may fall, the Croesus of to-day
May see, to-morrow, all his wealth, like snow, dissolve away.
And the auctioneer, at panic price, to the highest bidder sell
His marble home in which a king might well be proud to dwell.
But in my castle in the air, I have a sure estate
No panic with its hydra head can e'er depreciate.
No hard-faced sheriff dares to levy execution there,
For universal law exempts a castle in the air.
Little remains to be said. This singular life, with an estimate of the quality and quantity of its work has been unfolded as faithfully as possible.
With greater interest, the dominant motive of the author, so frankly stated, may now be joined, without comment, to his mournful retrospect of his life work. The first is found in the lines from Mrs. Hemans inscribed on the title page of "Backwoods Poems."
Something immortal of my