Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/310

294 Poets of the Civil War II from which it came, and then all the cotton fields of the South, from gray Atlantic dawns to the evening star ; and not only cotton fields, but the rivers and mountains and forests of this land, which blesses the worid with its mighty commerce, joining "with a delicate web remotest strands. " In offices of peace and love his country's mission lies; but now the enemy is coming — ^war is inevitable. In words of passionate indigna- tion and patriotism he exclaims: Oh, help us, Lord! to roll the crimson flood Back on its course, and, while our banners wing Northward, strike with us ! till the Goth shall cling To his own blasted altar-stones, and crave Mercy; and we shall grant it, and dictate The lenient future of his fate There, where some rotting ships and crumbling quays ._ Shall one day mark the Port which ruled the Western seas. The closing lines — ;partly ridiculous and partly pathetic in the light of today — are typical of the absolute confidence of the South. When the Confederate Congress met in Montgomery in February, 1861, Timrod hailed the birth of the new nation in his stateliest ode, Ethnogenesis. All nature's blessings are with the South and take part with her against the North, mad and blinded in its rage. The strength of pine and palm, the firmness and cahn of the hiUs, the snow of Southern sum- mers (cotton), the abundance of the harvests, the heart of woman, the chivalry of men are arrayed against materialism and fanaticism. To doubt the end were want of trust in God. The poem closes with a passage that still remains the most felicitous expression of the Southern temperament. Although the poet's vision of a separate nation was an illusion, there will never be a time when these words should not be quoted in any characterization of the natural warmth and cordiality of the Southern people: The hour perchance is not yet wholly ripe When all shall own it, but the type Whereby we shall be known in every land Is that vast gulf which lips our Southern strand.