At times there is "the easy elegance of Catullus", always his delight, and a metrical translation of whose poems he had completed.
Rare endowment with broad culture is evinced in the high intellectual level always maintained; and the evenness of quality that is always of the mountain top. He always knows his power, and its range.
His song is always clear and true.
Moreover, with a universality of poetic feeling, he has struck every chord, and always with a keen sensibility and delicacy of natural instinct.
Among the finest poems, how wide is this range and varied this power!
"The Vision of Poesy", his longest work, written in youth, essaying the mission and the philosophy of the poetic art, has some lofty passages, and all the promise of his later power, felicity, and melody.
"A Year's Courtship" is in its glow, and grace, and music the perfection of classic art.
The dainty voluptuousness in a "Serenade" kindles with the luxuriousness of the South.
His "Pr|aeceptor Amat" is warm with the breath of rapturous feeling, and rich with the fragrance of flowers.
"Ethnogenesis", "the birth of the nation", is regarded by some his greatest poem. It is prophecy linked with the hope and aspiration of the newborn nation of the South. A permanent image of the Southern nature and character is thus richly portrayed: --"But the type Whereby we shall be known in every land Is that vast gulf which lips our Southern strand, And through the cold, untempered ocean pours Its genial streams, that far off Arctic shores May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze Strange tropic warmth and hints of summer seas."
"The Cotton Boll", in "the snow of Southern summers", is a forerunner of Lanier's "Corn". It reveals the mystic spell and kingly power of that far-stretching tropic snow, and contains that glowing painting of Carolina from sea to mountain, which closes "No fairer land hath fired a poet's lays, Or given a home to man!"
"Too Long, O Spirit of Storm", is the fused passion of the poet's heart appalled at the moral death of stagnation. It has all the intensity and subtlety of Shelley.
In "The Lily Confidante", delicate and fanciful as it is, the reply of the Lily "is a simple yet sacred melody", hallowing the purity of passion.
"The Arctic Voyager" suggests Tennyson's "Ulysses" in its high faith, lofty purpose, and sustained power.
"Spring" is the burst of the Southern spring, in its flooding life and glory and beauty. There is "a nameless pathos in the air."
A wonderful revelation is going on before our eyes! No miracle could startle in the ever new creation, so strange and rapturous is this joy of sense and spiritual rebirth.
Nor was his genius only reflective, and creative, and playful; his was a trumpet voice also. When the blast of war sounded, his voice rang like a clarion in "Carolina" and "Cry to Arms".
Beyond their local meaning, which kindles and thrills, now as then, the men of the South, they have an abiding, universal power from the standpoint of art; for there is nothing finer in all the martial strains of the lyric.
Paul Hayne, his brother poet, speaking of "Carolina", as "lines destined perhaps to outlive the political vitality of the State, whose antique fame they celebrate," said: --"I read them first, and was thrilled by their power and pathos, upon a stormy March evening in Fort Sumter! Walking along the battlements, under the red light of a tempestuous sunset, the wind steadily and loudly blowing from off the bar across the tossing and moaning waste of waters, driven inland; with scores of gulls and white sea-birds flying and shrieking round me, -- those wild voices of Nature mingled strangely with the rhythmic roll and beat of the poet's impassioned music.
