tary for several months, often sitting at his desk till the early hours of morning, but the pay was certain and was sufficient to protect, for the time, him and his loved ones against the encroachments of hunger.

But the strain of body and mind, the struggles of a sensitive soul, the crushing disappointments, the blighted hopes, the dissipated day dreams of his life, were at last telling on his spirit and making fearful inroads on his bodily health and strength.

His physicians earnestly advised rest and a change of air, and Timrod resolved to respond to a long-standing invitation to visit his unwavering friend and brother poet, Paul Hayne, who had found a refuge for himself and family in a house little better than a hut in a pine forest twenty-five miles from Augusta, Georgia, where, to use his own terse expression, he was "keeping the wolf from the door at the point of his pen."

In the light of both antecedent and subsequent events that visit is invested with a peculiarly tender interest. It stands out as a living witness that the spirit of man, even in this world, is capable of rising above temporal disaster and of flourishing in those high, pure, placid regions of thought and feeling which are never disturbed by the wails of sorrow nor darkened by the shadows of calamity. So, have I known a light-winged bird to soar upward when the clouds were gathering darkly, and to sail serenely in the clear, quiet, etherial realms of blue,

while the black tempest far below rushed like an army of howling demons through the stately forests and over the blooming fields of the earth.

Hayne had been reduced from affluence to poverty and was now a refugee from his native State supporting himself and family as only the refugees of those days could tell how; Timrod's strength had been wasted in his long fierce battle with poverty and disease; and the two friends met sadly changed in all but their devotion-in all but mind and heart and soul, and all those higher attributes which dignify human life and impress on the human form the seal of immortality. Ah! truly did another post speak, and with a depth and breadth of which he was all unconscious, when he said:

"The sword may pierce the bearer,
Stone walls in time may sever,

"Tis heart alone worth steel and stone
That keeps men free forever."

The visit lasted perhaps a month. The scant hospitalities of the log cabin were dispensed with as generous and lordly a hand as ever a prince flourished at a banquet board groaning with luxurious and fastidious plenty, and were enjoyed with a zest as unbounded as the welcome that crowned the drooping spirits of the guest with garlands of sympathy and tenderest love. There were cominunings of kindred spirits too sacred to be described by an exoteric pen or told by an uninspired tongue.

.. Hayne wrote afterwards: "Ah! how sacred now, how sad and sweet are the memories of that rich, clear, prodigal August of '67.

"We would rest on the hillsides, in the swaying golden shadows, watching together the Titantic nasses of snow-white clouds which floated slowly and vaguely through the sky, suggesting by their form, whiteness, and serene motion, despite the season, flotillas of icebergs on Arctic seas. Like Lazzaroni we basked in the quiet noons, sunk into the depths of reverie, or perhaps of yet more charmed sleep. Or we smoked, conversing lazily between the puffs.

'Next to some pine whose antique roots just peeped

From out the crumbling bases of the sand!' "But the evenings, with their gorgeous sunsets rolling down like a chorus and the gray-eyed melancholy gloaming were the favorite hours of the day with him. He would often apostrophize twilight in the language of Wordsworth's sonnet:

'Hail, twilight! Sovereign of one peaceful hour!
Not dull art thou as undiscerning night;

But only studious to remove from sight
Day's mutable distinctions." "

Thus those halcyon days, rich in the early tints of autumn and glorified by the sweet intercourse of congenial minds, passed swiftly away, and Timrod's visit, like the drooping life it had cheered and strengthened, must soon

come to a close. He took his leave "just as the woods were assuming assuming their first delicate autumnal hues," and returned to the scenes of his struggles and trials. But his struggles and trials were also fast verging to a climax. Poverty and want became more and more harrassing as disease tightened its grip and hastened its ap proaches against the citadel of life. A severe hemorrhage from the lungs prostrated him in bed, and another and another followed, as if disease were impatient of opposition and fearful that the ground already gained might be reconquered. When his faithful physician informed him that there was no longer any hope, he was surprised but not shocked nor overwhelmed. He expressed regret that he should not have the opportunity to record the pure and delicate fancies which lately had thronged his brain, and that his life-work should be cut short in the midst of his days. But there was no word of murmur or complaint, as he resigned himself to the divine decree. His wife and his sisters attended constantly at his bedside, skilled physicians and sympathizing friends came around him, and all that skill could do and love suggest, was done to alleviate the sufferings and encourage the spirit of the dying poet His sister said to him, "You'll soon be at rest now," and he replied, "Love is sweeter than rest." He alluded to the little poem he had written beginning,

"Somewhere on this restless planet,"

and his sister remarked, "Yes, and that day which then seemed so far away, has come so soon."

It is at least a remarkable coincidence that he ceased to breathe at the very hour and almost at the very moment predicted in the poem. The whisper, "He is gone" was heard just as the day "puroled in the zenith and brightened on the lawn;" and the suffering poet had passed, let us fondly trust, to a life made doubly sweet by both love and rest. TIMROD'S POETRY.

Henry Timrod has lain in his grave nearly a third of a century, and still perhaps it is yet too early to form a just, impartial, and exact estimate of his poetry, or to assign him a permanent place in the world of letters. We of the South who feel a common pride in him and his achievements and whose deepest sympathies are moved by the story of his sufferings are liable to overrate him as a poet; while at the North, sectional prejudice perhaps has not yet sufficiently subsided to allow the free exercise of an impartial critical judgment. His poetry has not yet been read in England to any appreciable extent, and so it will probably be many years before the place of Timrod's poetry will be definitely fixed in literature by the concurrent taste and judgment of the English speaking race.

But in the face of these facts and with an honest effort to rise above the influences of sympathy and sectional pride, I venture the prediction that much of Timrod's poetry will live, and will grow in favor