or vague mysticisms. He fired the imagination purely, he awoke lofty
thoughts and presented, through his noble odes that which is the soul
of "every true poem, a living succession of concrete images and
pictures."

James Barron, the elder, organized the Virginia Colonial Navy, of
which he was commander-in-chief during the Revolution, and his sons,
Samuel and James, served gallantly in the United States Navy. It was
from these ancestors that James Barron Hope derived that unswerving
devotion to his native state for which he was remarkable, and it was
at the residence of his grandfather, Commodore James Barron, the
younger, who then commanded the Gosport Navy-yard, that he was born
the 23d of March, 1829.

His mother, Jane Barron, was the eldest daughter of the Commodore
and most near to his regard. An attractive gentlewoman of the old
school, generous, of quick and lively sympathies, she wielded a
clever, ready pen, and the brush and embroiderer's needle in a
manner not to be scorned in those days, and was a personage in her
family.

Her child was the child not only of her material, but of her
spiritual being, and the two were closely knit as the years passed,
in mutual affection and confidence, in tastes and aspirations.

His father was Wilton Hope of "Bethel," Elizabeth City County, a
handsome, talented man, a landed proprietor, of a family whose acres
bordered the picturesque waters of Hampton River.

He gained his early education at Germantown, Pennsylvania, and at