These poems are written in the life-blood of the poet and his generation.
The patriotic fire, the devoted sacrifice and splendid achievement,
that "Carolina", "Cry to Arms", "Unknown Dead", "Carmen Triumphale",
"Charleston", "Storm and Calm", and the other of the war poems celebrate
were not only the rushing tide of earnest feeling of a noble people then,
but are now a part of the glory and heritage of the State, of the South,
and of the American republic. They were the mighty heart-beats
of that great epoch. They are now irrevocable history, and make these poems
a part of the abiding literature of America.

"A Common Thought" is the poet's premonition of his end; but he sees
no vision of the dying glory of sunset, no going out into the dark,
no presentiment of a vague and gloomy voyage on a homeless sea;
but in the sunshine, in the growing light of ever broadening day,
amid the joy and splendor of nature, bright prophecy and intuition
of immortality, is to come the sudden, solemn mystery of the whisper,
"He is gone!" And so it was. For as the sun broadened into glad day,
and the full radiance illumined and animated earth and sea and sky,
"as it purpled in the zenith, as it brightened on the lawn," this rich
young life, in its own fresh morning of genius and spiritual sunshine,
passed, and in his own triumphant words, --

"not dies, no more than Spirit dies;
But in a change like death was clothed with wings."





The Late Judge George S. Bryan