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The Poems of Henry Timrod by Henry Timrod
page 27 of 215 (12%)
from Columbia. But early in October a vaguely threatening report
reached my ears. On the 9th it was mournfully confirmed.
Forty-eight hours before, Henry Timrod had expired!

On the 7th of October, the mortal remains of the poet, so worn and shattered,
were buried in the cemetery of Trinity Church, Columbia.

There, in the ruined capital of his native State, whence scholarship,
culture, and social purity have been banished to give place to the orgies
of semi-barbarians and the political trickery of adventurers and traitors;
there, tranquil amid the vulgar turmoil of factions,
reposes the dust of one of the truest and sweetest singers
this country has given to the world.

Nature, kinder to his senseless ashes than ever Fortune had been
to the living man, is prodigal around his grave -- unmarked and unrecorded
though it be -- of her flowers and verdant grasses, of her rains
that fertilize, and her purifying dews. The peace he loved,
and so vainly longed for through stormy years, has crept to him at last,
but only to fall upon the pallid eyelids, closed forever;
upon the pulseless limbs, and the breathless, broken heart.
Still it is good to know that

"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well."

Yet, from this mere material repose, this quiet of decaying atoms,
surely the most skeptical of thinkers, in contemplation of SUCH a life
and SUCH a death, must instinctively look from earth to heaven;
from the bruised and mouldering clod to the spirit infinitely exalted,
and radiant in redemption.
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